


Deadsville

by unreckless



Category: CW Network RPF, Supernatural RPF
Genre: Adultery, F/M, M/M, Strong Female Characters, angst like whoa, kid with a speaking role, nonlinear storyline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-14
Updated: 2009-08-14
Packaged: 2017-11-14 14:32:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/516221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unreckless/pseuds/unreckless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Communicating is hard, okay? Sort of like Brokeback Mountain with scalpels. There is, however, a happy ending. </p><p>Kind of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deadsville

**Author's Note:**

> Originall posted [here](http://likeanything.livejournal.com/14289.html)

Jared collapses to the side and presses his face into a cold spot on the pillowcase, fisting his hand in the fitted sheet just under the pillow.

“God, that was good,” he gasps.

“Jared,” says Jensen, voice soft in a way that terrifies Jared, just freezes his spinal fluid solid. He shoves Jared over a little more with three tentative fingertips to the spine of his shoulder blade.

Jared raises his head, propping himself up on an elbow to look at him.

“This has got to stop,” says Jensen, and then he rolls away, back to Jared, the pale bare line of him only just visible against the dark sheets and the shadowy room. Jared squints beyond him, at the window where the glow of the city keeps it from ever getting really dark even up here in the hills, and wishes that he’d left the lights on.

Jared turns over onto his back and counts to ten. Then twenty. “What?” he says finally.

“I can’t. I can’t do this anymore,” Jensen replies. Jared turns his head and stares at the back of Jensen’s neck, where the sweat-damp hair is curling up at the ends, thinking absently that it’s going to need cut soon. “I’m just tired, Jared,” Jensen continues, voice low and gravelly like he’s choking on something. Jared hopes he is choking.

“So go to sleep,” says Jared, squeezing his eyes closed.

“My wife is eight and a half months pregnant. I’m tired of checking the scores on my phone so I know who won when I have to lie, and I’m tired of wearing the same cologne you do so that she doesn’t smell you. And it all feels like I’m just breathing in nothing but water,” says Jensen. “I. I can’t do it anymore.”

Jared draws in a sharp breath, feels it like a defibrillator to the chest.

May has been unusually hot this year and the air-conditioning is up full-blast. It’s hard to hear exactly, but Jared thinks that soft snick-huff sound must be the hitch in Jensen’s breath, too. But even if it’s not, even if somebody in the bed is breathing normally, Jared can’t miss the tremor that starts in the breadth of Jensen’s shoulders and shimmies its way down his spine, twitching his arm against his flank and making his bad leg jerk. But the room is dark, and it’s late, and the pillow under Jared’s head smells too much like his wife’s shampoo, because he always sleeps on her side of the bed when she’s on the road with the team. He can’t focus at all.

But he knows what this is.

“Oh. Oh god,” he says. He clamps a hand over his eyes and grips so hard onto his temples that a hot ache ricochets through his head.

They lie there for several minutes, quiet and tense and careening apart at a dead tilt that Jared feels acutely but can’t track. It seems like Jensen is measuring his breaths out with great care, here at the edge, while it’s all Jared can do to keep breathing.

“Sleep here?” Jared whispers finally. He shivers as the sweat dries.

“Where is she tonight?” Jensen asks.

Jared thinks for a second, then feels bad that he has to stop and think. He looks at the bedside table and catches sight of one of her three hundred bobbleheads, this one a pitcher with a comically high leg kick, knee right up under his bobbling chin. There’s a breeze in the room. “Middle of the roadtrip. Getaway day. They’re playin’ Cleveland tomorrow,” he says, swallowing. “They won last night.”

Jensen doesn’t say anything, just punches his pillow hard enough to jiggle the whole bed. A lot more time passes, enough that Jared figures Jensen’s staying, but then Jensen reaches out and squeezes Jared’s arm, tight and sharp, just above the elbow joint. He looks calm, but his lips are thin and his eyes are dull. Then he pulls back and swings his legs over the side of the mattress. He pauses, feet flat on the ground and his head in his hands, takes a deep rattling breath with his spine looped over into a C. Jared just watches and tries not to make any sudden movements, and eventually Jensen gets up and limps around collecting his things. The only sounds are a rustle of a shirt, the clink of a belt buckle.

Jared flips over onto his stomach and faces away, watches the numbers on his clock so that he doesn’t have to watch Jensen leave. He hears Jensen’s footfalls pause, over by the doorway, and Jared can imagine him opening his mouth to say something and then close it when he can’t think of any words. But the three turns into a four turns into a five, and then the footsteps start up again, fading down the hallway.

The worst of it burns itself out in a couple of days. It helps that he has a few good surgeries to distract him—a perforated bowel is one of the highlights. Plus he can sit around in the dark at home, all by himself because his wife is with the team on the other side of the country and her kid is across the bay having Daddy time.

He has lunch with a group of other surgical residents and spends the whole time thinking about all the ways his life is going to be different and how he’s going to deal with that. He sketches out a list of numbers in ketchup, vinegary red lines on his plate, but stops when Chad calls him on it. Then he spots Jensen across the cafeteria looking exhausted and pale, stethoscope around his neck and scrubs rumpled, and Jared steals a French fry from Chad’s plate, smearing it through the list in case Jensen comes over and sees it. Jared refuses to be the one who isn’t dealing well.

“Look alive, motherfucker,” says Chad, then flings a fry at his head. Jared catches it before it hits the ground and drags it through his ketchup. Chad chatters on, mostly self-interested like usual. “Hey, d’your hot wife get me those autographs I asked for while she was in Atlanta?”

“I’ll ask,” says Jared. He watches Jensen pay for a bottle of orange juice, and he smiles tightly when he looks up. Jensen nods and taps his wrist, their longstanding method of arranging a meeting later. Jared nods back.

Hours later, they meet in a break room near Peds. The only other people there are a cluster of nurses in pink scrubs watching the TV over in the far corner. Some movie star, that Vincennes guy from that really terrible Aquaman movie a few years back, just got outed pretty spectacularly. It’s all anyone has talked about in weeks.

“So I’ve been thinking,” says Jensen. He tugs on the neck of his own scrub top, which is the most unflattering shade of magenta ever. Nobody looks good in that color, not even Jensen. “Cold turkey sucks. So I have this idea that maybe we get together-together once a year. Go on vacation somewhere just you and me.”

“Vacation?” Jared repeats.

Jensen nods. “We’ll tell the girls we’re going fishing or something, and then we’ll just spend the whole time in bed.” He takes a drink from his Thermos and shifts to lean his hip against the counter at a different angle. It’s the side he injured in a car accident back in undergrad, long before they knew each other. He walks with a bit of a limp, and Jared knows it still hurts him sometimes.

Jared makes a face. He can’t help it. “But what about when we come home without any fish?” he asks.

“Oh, fuck,” says Jensen, scratching the back of his neck with his free hand. He frowns for a second, staring blankly at the microwave, then he waves his hand dismissively. “Fine, you think of something.”

“What’s a good excuse two guys having an affair give their wives?” Jared asks, tone sharp and airy like steel wool. Jensen turns a few degrees away, watching the nurses as they start to trickle out of the room.

Jensen scowls. “Okay then,” he says. “Maybe a pilgrimage for the Cowboys-‘Skins game wherever it is this year—I think in DC, probably. God, I hope it’s not Dallas.” He pauses and looks at the ceiling, calculating, then he flashes a grin in Jared’s direction. “Yeah, no, I think it’s in DC. We could do that—could even actually go to the game.”

Jared smiles back. “You think we can take a break from lying in our own filth to go sit in the fucking cold to watch football?” he asks quietly. He doesn’t give a shit about football, not like Jensen does.

“Point,” Jensen says, eyes flashing dark. He turns away and tops off his thermos of coffee from the machine on the counter.

Jared feels his heart give a painful, wobbly throb, and he stands there by the microwave for a long time after Jensen says something about “getting back to the birth canals” and leaves. He wanders over to the TV and rubs his fingertips over his sternum and watches part of an old interview from when _Aquaman_ first came out.

“Yeah, _Aquaman_ ’s kind of a joke in pop culture, which really sucks,” the actor says. He twists around in his chair and points at the huge poster behind him, where a very stylized image of himself in scaly green rubber pants is looking very determined and underwater. “But we’re trying to change that in this film. _Aquaman_ can totally kick ass!”

Jared doesn’t get how it can possibly be surprising that this guy likes dick.

\--

It was two years ago they were out celebrating Jared’s birthday, not too long after Jensen got back from his honeymoon, just the two of them having some beers at a bar near the hospital. This tiny dark-haired woman came stumbling up to them in a bar, more exotic than pretty, all dark eyes and lush lips and swimming in a green Zito jersey that was scuffed with dirt on the number on the front. The three of them stood there for a second, staring at each other quietly—Jensen’s mouth still open in the middle of a word—then she latched onto Jensen’s wrist and gave him a moony look. His jaws clicked shut.

“I just want to tell you something. You are the prettiest person in this place,” she told him very seriously. He glanced at Jared over the top of her head and Jared held his hands up. “No, seriously. I know pretty people, okay? And, like, you’re way prettier than I am, and that really has to stop. The guys being prettier than me thing. Givin’ me a complex just going to work. And you’re a dude—wait, you are a guy, right? I mean, sometimes you can’t tell. This has happened to me before. Like, I go up to somebody to compliment them for being the best looking guy in the room and it turns out to be a super androgynous-looking girl. And that’s really awkward. Kind of rude, too.”

“Uh, I’m sorry?” said Jensen, giving Jared a ‘help me, asshole’ look that Jared, who was too busy laughing so hard he was going to hurt himself, totally ignored.

“Nah, it’s cool,” the girl said, waving a hand dismissively. She leaned closer and squinted up at his face, and he raised an eyebrow at her. “It doesn’t look like you’re wearing makeup, but then again it’s not like the really manly bull-dykes are lining up for the mascara and lipstick combo, am I right? So I’m not sure. You kind of have stubble, though. But you could be hormone treating. So I don’t know. God, you’re pretty. I’m having a hard time looking away, like I’m a fly and you’re one of those blue zappy things.” She giggled drunkenly.

Jensen blinked stupidly at her. He took a deep breath and tried to think of something to say that might get her to go away. “Okay, look, uh… scary drunk girl—”

“Jen,” she said, cutting him off.

He stared at her for a second. “What?”

She looked equally baffled. “What?”

“I don’t even know you,” he said slowly. “You don’t get to call me Jen. Even this dickhole doesn’t get to call me Jen.” He waved his beer at Jared, who just kept laughing and wiping tears out of his eyes.

She shook her head. “Wait, your name is Jen, too? Holy shit! I’m so sorry—please don’t, like, hit me, okay?” She gave him a pleading, rather pathetic look, all big dark eyes sparkling in the green Heineken neon Jensen kept whacking his head on right behind him. She shook her head again, like she was trying to clear out some fog. “Wow, how does this keep happening to me? I need, like, Superman’s laser vision so I can see through people’s pants and make sure I’m not going up to anybody else with a vag and telling her how she’s the prettiest dude in the room. I promise not to even use it for nefarious purposes.”

“What? Oh, Jesus.” He thunked his head against the Heineken sign on purpose this time. “No! It’s not—this time you were totally right. I mean… okay. Fuck it. Yes, I am a guy.”

She narrowed her eyes and pointed at him. “But your name is—”

Jensen sighed. “No, my name is Jen _sen_. Two syllables.”

“But that’s, like, somebody’s last name,” she said, still looking confused. Jared howled, pounding the wall behind him and hiccupping.

“And it’s my first name,” he said wearily, glaring at Jared over her head. “Trust me, it’s confusing when you’re sober, so I’m sure it’s pretty fuckin’ beyond you right now.” He got the feeling he was being a dick, especially with the overly sympathetic look he had on his face, but she just shrugged and motioned for him to continue. “Look, I—your name is Jen, right?”

“Genevieve,” she said, nodding. “So, like, Gen with a ‘g.’” She wiggles her finger in the air like she’s drawing her initial.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. His wedding ring pinched the webbing between his fingers. It was new and he wasn’t used to it yet. “Okay, Gen,” he said slowly. “My name is Jensen. I am a guy. Thank you for the compliment.” He hoped the _now go away_ was implied.

She flashed him a bright grin. “I am so glad we got that cleared up,” she said happily. “I’m really glad you have a penis.”

“Me too,” Jensen agreed. Jared collapsed against the wall and gasped for breath, slapping his thigh so loud Jensen could hear it over the music.

“And your lips are amazing, by the way.”

Jensen blinked. “Uh, thank you?”

“Any time,” she said. Then she abruptly pivoted forty-five degrees and grinned up at Jared. “Okay, you. Tall guy. So. My boys over there just won, which I approve of like I approve of kittens and sunshine, and I am _really_ drunk right now, and this might turn out to be another questionable life choice I’ll live to regret, but fuck it. You’re hot. You’re tall and gangly with funny hair and… God, I have a type, don’t I? Ask my son’s dad about how I have a type.” She frowned for a moment, eyes focused across the bar at a group over by the dartboard. Then her smile reignited and she shook her head. “So anyway, yeah. You wanna dance?”

Jared married her.

\--

“We’re going to call her Lila Adele,” Jensen croaks. He led the way through the maze of parents in scrubs and babies in little glass boxes, coming to a stop next to one incubator in particular and gazing down through the shell. Jared watches and feels his heart lurch in his chest, a sharp up and down like a curveball.

The baby inside was big for the Neonatal unit, a full-term seven-plus pounds that looked absurd surrounded by premies that would fit in cereal bowls. Jared feels entirely too huge to be in the room, glancing around uncomfortably. He looks down at Baby Girl Ackles and thinks that at least her grayish color fits in with the rest of them.

“Yeah?” says Jared, resting his hand on the edge of the plastic. “Lila.”

“I think we’re already calling her Lila-dele,” says Jensen, voice very flat. “What’s that called, a portmanteau? Something French.”

“She’s gonna be okay, Jensen,” says Jared finally, moving his hand to Jensen’s shoulder.

“It’s just a staph infection,” says Jensen hollowly, nodding once. “It’s common. I know this.”

There were complications from the epidural and his wife’s labor stopped, and they had to deliver the baby via emergency C-section, which had horrified her. “I have a birth plan! This is not on it!” she had yelled at Misha, Jensen’s chief resident who had been on tap to deliver the baby, and the maternal-fetal surgeon, even as the anesthesiologist was getting to work.

Jared edges up closer and peers at the baby, on her belly with a tiny pink hat on her head, marveling like always that something so small and wrinkly will be a person someday, a full-grown woman with a job and a family and a life. Babies never really seem like people to him. Hell, he still has trouble thinking of his six-year-old stepson as a person and not just a dumb little kid that sleeps at his house sometimes.

“She’s gonna be fine. Perfect, even,” Jared babbles, rubbing his hand up and down Jensen’s upper arm. “You’ll see. She’s gonna bounce back so far it’ll be ridiculous.”

Jensen leans into the touch for a second, eyes going thin with pleasure, but he doesn’t respond. He just reaches one of his hands through the little hatch and brushes his finger down one tiny arm. Jared drops his own hand and watches as the baby wraps her tiny hand around the tip of Jensen’s finger, and he shakes his head. This isn’t something he has any business watching, a moment that isn’t his to share, and he takes a step away.

One of the other dads, orbiting another incubator, glances up and gives Jared a distracted almost-smile, taking in Jared’s scrubs and probably thinking, _oh look a doctor, never seen one of those before_. Jensen looks up, too. He’s got terrible bruises under his eyes and waxy skin, days of stubble shadowing badly hollowed-out cheeks.

“Hey,” he says. “Stay with me?”

So Jared stays.

\--

The first time they met was three weeks into their first semester of med school. Jensen was out with some friends from Caltech who were up looking for jobs. He was three weeks in and already exhausted and overwhelmed and considering maybe research instead of medicine.

There wasn’t even any alcohol involved, just two designated drivers sitting awkwardly at neighboring tables while their groups of friends got shitfaced, and eventually it was just him and the stupidly tall kid at the tables while everybody else was dancing. They struck up a conversation about the music, which was bad, but the talk was good.

“I’m Jared,” the kid said finally.

“Yeah, I know,” said Jensen. He took a sip of his Coke and hid a smile.

Jared looked startled. “What?”

“Pharmacology,” said Jensen. “With Dr. Shapiro? You sit in the back and make shitty jokes about psychotropic drugs.”

“No shit?” Jared laughed, running a hand through his hair. “You do look kinda familiar, though. Wait, are you that asshole who sits up front, the one with the two last names and the fuckin’ questions that go on forever?”

Jensen rolled his eyes. “What do you mean, ‘go on forever’? That shit is important,” he said, then cringed at how defensive he sounded.

“Oh, relax, man. No harm meant.” Jared grinned and held out a hand. “So yeah. I’m Jared.”

“Jensen,” he replied, shaking on it.

He wasn’t particularly surprised when he woke up in Jared’s bed the next morning. Jared smiled and made Eggo waffles in the toaster, and they talked about nothing over orange juice. And after that, Jensen just borrowed some clothes that were too big, loose in the shoulders and long in the arms but all together awesome, and they walked to Shapiro’s class together.

\--

More time passes. It’s almost June and the weather just gets thicker, a sticky fog that comes in off the bay and fills every bit of space. The hospital’s climate controls can barely handle it. It’s completely airless in the on-call rooms.

“So let me get this straight. We’re going to do this once a year?” says Jared. Jensen nods quickly, sitting down on the edge of the bunk and looking like he doesn’t quite trust his legs to keep holding him up.

“That’s what we decided,” says Jensen, sounding strangled. Not enough oxygen in the world for this, certainly not enough in the room.

“That’s gonna be enough, right?”

“It’s gotta be,” Jensen replies. Jared sinks down in front of him and kneels between his thighs. Jensen’s breath hitches and he jerks back so they aren’t touching, but Jared’s fits his hands over Jensen’s upper arms and doesn’t let go. “I have—Jared, two days ago I had a baby. I’m… Jared, I’m somebody’s dad right now, and you’re somebody’s husband and.” He breaks off when Jared just slides closer, pressing their chests together, and opens his mouth against his neck. Jensen threads his hand through the hair at the back of Jared’s neck, tips his own head to give him better access. Jared runs with it, shoving his face against the hot, salty-smelling line of neck and just inhaling. “Fuck,” Jensen breathes. “Jared, once a year has to be enough.”

Jared draws back and catches his gaze, giving him a serious look he hopes conveys everything he feels and can’t say. “Yeah,” he says. “Yes. Okay? Yes.”

Jensen uses the hand still on the back of Jared’s neck to pull him close, resting their foreheads together. Jared strokes his thumb over cheekbones and the curve of jaw and squeezes his eyes closed.

“It’s gotta be enough,” Jensen whispers.

\--

They pulled away one time before, is the thing. It’s practically old hat, an old wound they can cut open like a guideline. Jared sat him down and dispassionately went through a list of reasons why they shouldn’t see each other for a while—just a break, you know—early in the summer after they finished the classroom part of medical school. They were looking down the long corridor of internship rotations and residencies, which would begin in September but at different hospitals, one of them on either side of the Bay.

“We’ll never survive it if we don’t do this now, dude,” Jared had said, not making eye contact. “It’s better this way.”

Jensen was crushed, but he just nodded, sure, sure, man. Of course. He couldn’t come up with the words to fight it, so he just went along with whatever Jared said. So they didn’t see each other for a long time, although they still talked on the phone a lot, but at least there was the chaos of suddenly being a doctor—a real, actual medicine-practicing _doctor_ —to distract him from Jared’s throbbing phantom limb presence, and the calendar slipped by easily enough.

Then, in December Jensen’s sister came to town for some job interviews with some of the big PR firms in San Francisco, and she ended up spending the holiday with him since he couldn’t take enough time off from the hospital to fly home to Texas. She took one look at him and made it her mission in life to get him to stop moping and go out.

“Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?” she asked one night, a week or so before Christmas, glaring through her slightly damp bangs. She was wearing a fluffy purple bathrobe that made her look like a Muppet, frowning at him from the mouth of the hallway where it emptied into the kitchen. He was sitting with his feet up on the kitchen table because goddamnit, it was his table and he could put his feet up if he wanted to, no matter how much she scowled at him.

“Two thirds of the Big Three just got traded in the last couple of days,” he said irritably, holding up the front page of the day’s sports section. “I, like the rest of my adoptive city, am in mourning.”

“Okay, I have no idea what that means,” said McKenzie, rolling her eyes. “Come on, I’m going to get ready. Keep me company, ‘kay?”

He brought the paper with him and followed her. “Jesus. How are you taking up my entire bathroom?” he said, boggling at the huge spread of girl stuff covering his bathroom counter.

She paused, flat iron halfway down a long chunk of hair. “That’s it,” she said. She unclamped the iron and set it down. She grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him into his bedroom. “You’re coming out with me tonight and we’re getting you laid. You don’t have to be at the hospital tonight, right?”

“I just got off a forty-eight, so I have a full twenty-four off,” he said. She let go of his arm and threw open his closet door. “I don’t see why I have to go out with you.”

She glared at him. “Jensen, I get that you’re going through a breakup or something. But seriously, buddy, no girl is worth this froth of crazy you’ve worked up. Now pick a shirt.” He froze and swallowed heavily, but she just turned back to the selection of clothes and shook her head. “Actually, no. You go shower and do something less gay with your hair, and I’ll pick your clothes.”

He patted his hair awkwardly, feeling hunted. “What’s wrong with my hair?”

“ _Jensen_ ,” she said patiently.

“Fine,” he acquiesced.

Not quite an hour later, they were crawling into the ancient pickup truck that had been handed down from each Ackles sibling to the next, which his sister had somehow managed to keep in running condition. He was wearing a dark collared shirt and jeans, and the overprotective big brother in him wanted to cover up her amazing amount of bare skin with a sheet.

“Can it,” she said, tugging her skirt down a little once they were settled on the bench seat. “Drive.”

The club they ended up at was one of those stupid trendy places with the obnoxious theme and overpriced drinks, but some girl at the last place McKenzie interviewed got her a VIP pass so at least they didn’t have to wait in the line outside. Jensen, who preferred domestic on tap and a Niners game on the TV if he had to be in a bar when he was in San Francisco, was not tremendously impressed.

“This is actually the ancient spawning ground of douchebags, isn’t it?” he said to his sister, casting a disdainful look around. “They all somehow manage to converge here to mate. I am not going to walk out of here without either a popped collar, a spray-on tan, or the overwhelming urge to wear aviators indoors. Why would you bring me here?”

“Because you need to get laid, big brother,” she said, patting him on the chest. “Now you’re in a douchebag club, so go pretend you’re a douchebag and do as they do.”

“Go find somebody pretty to rub up against, is what you’re saying.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re a doctor, Jennybean, I assume you know how it works.”

Halfway through the night, Jensen found himself with a hot redhead in a white dress. Half the room was looking at her, but he wasn’t sure if it was because they recognized her or because she was wearing a skirt that was actually shorter than his sister’s. All he could think was, thank god for uncomplicated pretty girls.

“Are you thirsty?” she yelled in his face when the song changed. She was glistening with sweat, especially her collarbones and her fantastic cleavage.

“I could drink!” he said, nodding. She grabbed his arm and dragged him towards the VIP area, which appeared to be a raised platform above the main dance floor.

“Hey, Clif, this one’s with me, okay?” she said to the bouncer standing in front of the short flight of steps leading up to the VIP section. He was a gigantic man, bigger than Jared even, but he smiled affectionately at her and stepped aside. “You’re a peach,” she said, pecking him on the cheek as they passed.

“I’m a prince, sweetheart,” he said gruffly.

“I’m Danneel,” she said, turning to Jensen once they got to the top of the stairs. She looked at him expectantly and he shrugged. And that night he went home with her because she was new and she wanted him and she was there.

She worked for some big PR firm, one of the ones his sister had an interview with, and she was working on a campaign for the club. She was thoroughly unmoved by his being a doctor, which he welcomed like the scotch she kept ordering them. They really clicked, though. She told dirty jokes and could burp the alphabet, and later that night he discovered that she could actually wrap her legs around her neck.

“I hate you just a little,” McKenzie told him a few days later, after she walked in on him fucking Danneel against the bathroom counter.

“I could put in a good word for you,” he offered.

“Eat shit and die,” she replied. “You’re out of milk, by the way.”

She got the job at Danneel’s firm, though, so she couldn’t bitch too much. She even commented that Jensen seemed happier.

It was another two weeks before he spoke to Jared again, and it was just on the phone after a long day at work. Jared sounded sad and tired, but Jensen didn’t have a lot of sympathy.

“So, hey,” said Jensen after a lull in the conversation. He idly scratched his balls and crunched a handful of Cheez-Its. “I met somebody. A girl. And she’s amazing and I want you to meet her.”

Jared didn’t answer for a second and Jensen started to repeat himself, but Jared just stammered, “Yeah?” He even sounded happy, if bewildered.

Jared snorted. “She hot?”

“She’s so hot it hurts to look at her, man. Seriously, google her. Danneel Harris. D, A, two Ns, two Es, and an L,” said Jensen. He tossed some more Cheez-Its in his mouth. “She works in PR, I don’t know, apparently she’s kind of a big deal. So… she wants to meet you. I guess I talk about you a lot, or something,” he added, laughing nervously. Jared didn’t say anything. “She offered to cook for us—and I swear to god, her jambalaya would make Jesus cry it’s so good—and she asked me to invite you over so that she could ‘have a look at you.’”

He didn’t think she meant it like she wanted to have a look at the competition, but he’d noticed her eyes going shuttered when he would catch himself talking a little too much about Jared, so he wasn’t sure.

“Dude, okay,” said Jared, laughing shortly. “When you go and throw food the pot and make it all sweet-like you know I’m gonna be there. God. I’m so fuckin’ busy I don’t have time to eat some days, let alone sleep.” His voice was starting to fade.

“Remind me why you picked surgical again,” Jensen asked.

“Fuck you,” Jared retorted tonelessly. “Why d’you like OB so much?”

Jensen paused. He chewed thoughtfully and then he said, “Obviously the nonstop pussy.”

Jared’s answering laugh was finally full and hearty and real, and the subject changed to their patients. Jensen forgot about everything else for a few hours, and they fell asleep still on the phone.

\--

They develop a habit where they go out to eat with the wives on most of the Sundays that Andy’s dad is in town and can take the kid. Sometimes they have brunch and sometimes it’s dinner, and oddly it’s never really awkward. They sit across from each other usually but sometimes not, because the girls have become friends and sometimes they want to giggle together.

Jared doesn’t like Danneel, not really. Sure, she’s perfectly nice and gorgeous and funny, and Jensen really does love her, and she cooks like a fucking rock star. She seems to like Jared just fine, in an abstract kind of way where she’s glad he makes Jensen happy, but Jared can’t stand to be anywhere near her. He doesn’t like her laugh, or how sometimes her smile flickers when she looks at Jensen, like she’s trying to figure out a really tough Sudoku puzzle but she’s one number short of really solving it.

That number, obviously, is Jared, and he isn’t exactly inclined to help her out.

He wants to ask her if Jensen says anything when they’re in bed, if Jensen’s ever told her about the scars. He doesn’t think he’s jealous, but he’s something, and it’s getting harder to be around her.

A few Sundays after Lila is born, the four of them are at some relentlessly trendy restaurant one of Danneel’s friends owns. Jared can see the harassed-new-parent look melting off of Jensen’s and Danneel’s faces as the meal progresses, both of them enjoying the first real reprieve they’ve had since they brought their daughter home. Jensen’s wearing a suit that’s tailored too well, and a tie Jared wants to use to do dirty things to him. He wants to shove him down on a flat surface and kiss away the exhaustion. He just wants to touch him and he can’t, so he holds his flatware too tightly and doesn’t pay any attention to what he orders except for a bottle of cabernet.

Halfway through the main course, one of Jensen’s patients goes into labor and he gets a panicked phone call from the father. “Okay, I need you to calm down, Mr. Welling. Yes, I know it’s scary. But I need you to breathe,” he’s saying, standing up and straightening his suit jacket and gathering his keys, making a face as he tries to soothe the poor man.

After he’s gone, looking harassed again and barely saying goodbye to anyone, Danneel leans over to Gen and says, “Oh, he was just like that dad when I went into labor, I promise you.” Jared watches, a little bemused and a lot drunk on wine by then, as both women erupt into laughter.

Gen grins. “Did I ever tell you about when Andy was born? His dad was in the middle of a roadtrip at the time, of course, way out east. Like, Baltimore or something. And god, I love him to death but the man’s mostly useless. I couldn’t get a hold of him until the next night, and I’m shrieking when I get him on the line finally, so mad I could reach through the phone and throttle him and then he was just like, ‘What? Sorry, the game was— and then we got really drunk afterwards.’ And then he pauses like it’s sinking in and he goes, ‘Wait, the baby? You had the baby? Oh my god.’ Like, over and over again until somebody came and made him get off the phone because he needed to get some sleep. Luckily, I found me a non-idiot this time around.” She puts her hand on Jared’s arm and squeezes. Jared looks at Jensen’s empty seat and thinks she’s probably wrong about that.

But Gen’s still talking, because talking is what she does best. She’s saying, “I’m sure this one’ll be properly Tasmanian devil nervous when our time comes. Right, honey?”

Jared doesn’t even have time to arrange his face into a surprised expression before she blusters on with an impression of Jared in a tizzy that isn’t flattering at all. Danneel laughs that horrible braying laugh. It makes Jared want to fling the butter at her face, but that’s not exactly socially acceptable so he punishes the remains of his pork chops instead and looks covetously at the steak abandoned on Jensen’s plate.

“I mean, it’s way in the future for us, but yeah,” Gen continues, laughing as well. “I just know Jared’s going to be going all to pieces, but luckily Jensen’ll be there, right?”

A bite of pork nearly goes down Jared’s trachea. “What?” he croaks, taking a sip of wine to keep from choking.

Gen rolls her eyes. “I mean, obviously Jensen’ll be delivering our babies, right?” she says, thumping him on the back. “It’s his job and he’s your best friend, and I just figured… but, yeah, okay, I guess it is kind of weird to be planning on your husband’s best friend having intimate knowledge of your stretched-out vag, huh?”

Both women laugh again. Jared looks down at his dinner and tries not to feel sick. Either he doesn’t very hard or that is some talented sick. He drops his silverware and chokes down water.

\--

They slipped, of course, slid back into each other like always, and eventually it just got to be habit. One time, the day Jensen delivered his first baby completely on his own, Jensen drove straight to the house Jared was sharing with a couple other surgicals from his hospital, collapsed into Jared’s bed, and bitched about it for an hour, the Red Sox breaking their curse in the background. It was the first time they had seen or spoken to each other in three weeks.

Jared laid there next to him for a few moments, feeling strangely awkward with Jensen’s face in his armpit, and then he curled his arm around him. Jensen adjusted in turn and snuffled contentedly, cheek resting finally on Jared’s chest.

“Okay, that was the worst experience of my life,” he groaned. “Remember how I hated biochem? Fifty times worse.”

“Bullshit,” said Jared, laughing and jostling him a little. “You’re gonna go back and do it again tomorrow and you know it.”

“Damn fuckin’ straight,” Jensen snapped, shifting back on his elbow to give Jared a seriously? glare. “God, I thought I was going to fuck it all up, kill them both maybe. And Misha—my chief resident, crazy son of a bitch—he’s standing behind me, right there and practically laughing his ass off and not being helpful at all. Motherfucker.”

“I’ll beat his ass next time I see him,” Jared promised. “How’s that sound.”

“Fuck you,” Jensen replied sulkily, settling back down and sliding his icy hands up under Jared’s shirt. Jared squawked, grabbing his wrist with one hand.

“How ‘bout I fuck you instead?” he said. He skated the fingertips of his other hand up the cut of Jensen’s spine, right down to the elastic of his shorts.

Jensen sighed and arched into the touch. “Later, maybe,” he said, settling down against Jared. “I think I musta forgot to take my meds this morning or something. Now that I’m down I’m way too sore to do anything but lay here and be.”

Jared didn’t know all the details, but he had pieced together what he could from Jensen’s standing painkiller prescriptions and the nasty tangle of scars spiderwebbing over his right side, the epicenter on his right hip and radiating up to his last rib and halfway down his thigh. The most information Jared had been able to get out of him was that he had spent three hours pinned under a Honda Civic and that he’d gone through four surgeries to rebuild his crushed pelvis, and Jared learned that the second day he knew him.

“It’s been years, man,” Jensen had said, waving a dismissive hand. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Dude,” Jared had protested, “it was bad enough that you’re still not completely better how many years later.”

“Just let it go, okay?” Jensen had warned, then distracted him with his mouth.

Jared didn’t forget, though. He wasn’t sure what to think about it. Maybe Jensen had been drunk and he’d killed someone, nearly killing himself in the process. Maybe someone he loved died in the crash, or maybe he’d sustained a head injury and didn’t actually remember anything. It was just another one of those things that they both thought about constantly and never discussed.

Their relationship had always been a silent one. Sometimes Jared wondered what it might be like if it weren’t, but he was too busy to dwell on the subjunctive.

Jensen’s breathing had evened out, but Jared didn’t think he was quite asleep yet. His shoulders were still tense, the leg kicked over Jared’s twitching a little. Jared ran his hand down his side and thought about how the ruined skin on the other side of the fabric would feel.

“Okay then,” he said, closing his own eyes and letting himself sink back down into the mattress. He groped around for the remote and turned off the TV. The game was a wash anyway. “Just lay here. That’s what we’ll do.”

\--

In mid-July, Jensen invites Jared out to some charity thing Danneel’s firm is throwing at some club in downtown San Francisco, an extra ticket to burn because Danneel herself is in New York for the weekend. When they get there it turns out to be the same club where he and Danneel met, which he tells Jared as they park the car.

“Awkward,” Jared comments, looking up at the building, a converted warehouse full of hip loft apartments and expensive boutiques. The club itself is still ugly inside, still packed with beautiful empty-eyed people.

They get drinks at the bar and find a table nearby, tucked kind of into a corner and away from the crush. Nearby, a drug deal is going down between a pretty blonde with too much makeup and a skinny boy who looks like he should be getting home soon if he’s going to make it to class in the morning. The guest list is a who’s who of the Bay Area, a few minor celebrities up for the event, politicians and athletes mingling, plus the attractive filler that managed to score tickets. A thin, blondish man with a hooked nose passes by their table and recognizes Jared, stops and greets him, “Oh, hey! Genevieve’s husband, right? What’s up? How’s he little man?” Jensen can place him as a player but isn’t quite sure who, out of uniform and without a hat. He squints, tries to imagine the man with a green brim instead of a forehead but it’s a no-go. He wonders for a second why he’s not on a field somewhere, but it’s the All-Star Break, isn’t it?

“I’m gonna get another round,” says Jared, standing and looking ill at ease, shoulders up around his ears and looking around like everybody’s watching him. Jensen leans back in his chair and thinks that Jared deserves to feel hunted, this isn’t Jensen’s fault.

He rests his head back against the wall and watches. People who look vaguely familiar to him pass by, girls in too-short skirts and men in too-expensive pants, but he’s not interested. He’s not even sure why this seemed like a good idea, especially when Jared turns away from the bar and looks back at him, eyes dark with something Jensen wants so bad he feels like he’ll die from wanting, but then the bartender steals Jared’s attention back.

Jensen closes his eyes, feeling like he’s been kicked in the chest. He’s not going to survive this, he thinks hysterically. No way. These wounds were already mortal when he broke it off in May, and that football game in DC can’t come fast enough. He presses two knuckles into the groove between his eyebrows and exhales slowly through his nose.

He’s willing to concede the obvious. This was such a bad idea.

\--

Genevieve worked in the Oakland Athletics front office, which was pretty cool but not even the third coolest thing about her. Jared wasn’t entirely sure what she did, exactly, but she talked about the players a lot in oddly personal terms, and her anecdotes all rang like she was at the team’s beck and call (the dinner date in July of ’08 that she had to leave early to go talk her drunk closer down off a roof, for example, or virtually any time Barry Zito called).

She spent most of dinner their first date talking about the upcoming trade deadline, the odds of which teams would be buyers and which would be sellers and which big names were on the block, until she noticed Jared’s eyes glazing over and changed the subject to something neutral.

Later, while they were waiting in line to see _Aquaman_ , she got a phone call from her boss that really set her off. As soon as she hung up she launched into a rant that Jared didn’t follow at all, about the organization’s tendency toward using players up and then shipping them out for new shinies, don’t you dare move Zito now, please god let this be our year please.

After she finished, panting a little, he grinned at her. “Are you even real?” he asked, amazed and thoroughly charmed.

She glanced down and grinned back. “Totally real,” she said.

He choked on his tongue. “What?”

“What?You’re a surgeon, right? I’m just pointing out how I’m not surgically enhanced, even if they aren’t all that spectacular. Well, I mean okay, yeah I have a kid, but... Wait, is that not how surgeon training works? I totally failed biology, so all I know about doctoring is what I see on TV. And not even the serious shows like ER. And not even House, although I wouldn’t turn Dr. Chase away if he showed up on my doorstep with a bouquet of weeds and a hopeful look, you know? That accent kills me. And you kind of have Dr. Chase hair, too, only dark, which I like. I don’t know about you, but I think blond pubic hair is just weird. Anyway, yeah. So I watch shit like Grey’s Anatomy and Nip/Tuck, and I’m pretty sure they’ve given me unrealistic images of doctors. What do you think?”

“Maybe,” he said, blinking in surprise to find they were at the front of the line. He smiled at the kid in the ticket booth and slid his credit card in the well at the bottom of the glass. “Two for _Aquaman_.”

Genevieve just kept talking.

“That’s what I thought! I mean, basically the image they give is that you spend your med school years doing nothing but studying and boning indiscriminately. Like the minor leagues or something.” She pauses, smirking fiercely, and gives him a thoughtful look. “I bet you have all kinds of raunchy stories about blowing off steam after, like, gross anatomy lab or finals, don’t you?”

He did, of course, but since most of them involved Jensen, he kept mum.

“Sure,” he said. “Cadavers really get me hot, you know? Dead girls don’t say no.”

She pumped her fist in the air. “I knew it!”

“Popcorn?”

“Nah. Reminds me of work. Let’s get Raisinets.” She scratched her nose and led the way across the lobby to get in the concessions line. “Got, I should’ve gotten a tutor in bio and gone to med school instead, huh? I have not had nearly enough sex in my life. My business degree did not serve me well in that respect.” She sighed dramatically and glanced around. “And trust me, I am not a virgin by, like, any stretch of the imagination… Okay, that’s not true. All that and I’ve never done anal. I know, weird. It just doesn’t sound like a fun time to me. For a girl, I mean. I get why you menfolk are into it, believe me. Not that _you_ are. Unless you _are_. Right. So. Yeah. I get why buttsex is fun for dudes. I’ve even gotten the explanation, how you have that happy little gland up there and all. But girls? Not so much. Plus, we have that other, conveniently self-lubricating hole that’s, like, _right_ next door, and…” she trailed off, noticing that the concessions girl and Jared were both staring at her with their mouths open. “Oh, wow, this is so not a first date-appropriate topic, is it? I’m really, really sorry. I don’t get to talk to normal people much and I bet it shows, huh?”

“Nah,” he said, smiling and thanking the concessions girl, “usually it’s me who talks too much. Ask Jensen sometime.”

She gives him a slightly too-close look that makes him laugh uncomfortably. “D’you talk about gay sex with him the first time you two hung out?”

“Yes, actually,” said Jared, holding open the theater door for her and avoiding eye contact. “It comes up a lot, apparently.”

“Doctors,” she said, rolling her eyes.

 

 

It turns out that time has this tendency to keep going after all. The Wednesday of the week before Thanksgiving, Jensen kisses his wife and daughter goodbye and drives to the airport, hugs Jared when they meet in the terminal, and boards their nonstop flight to Dulles International. They don’t really look at each other much during the flight, no stolen glances or wistful looks, because they’ve had all summer and fall to work past that.

It’s been a quiet few months, work lubricating the machine, people dying and being born keeping them busy enough to forget, getting together for friendly barbeques and Sunday night double dates with their wives. And maybe it’s been tense, trying not to fall back into old habits this time, this time it sticks. They haven’t slipped. Every time Jensen wants to take it all back—every time he _wants_ —he thinks about his girls back home and how it’s his job to make sure they’re happy. And even if there’s nothing in the world that makes him happier than Jared, well, they’re more important than that.

So he and Jared stick to their agreement, and in November they lie blithely to their wives about manly bonding time and a football game that they, as native Texans, must attend (and neither woman is suspicious, even though both Jared and Jensen escaped to California immediately after high school, couldn’t wait to leave it behind). They get on a plane to DC.

This will be enough, Jensen tells himself as the rental car agent slides him a set of keys. He smiles at her and squeezes the sharp ridges into the insides of his knuckles.

It has to be enough.

The drive to the hotel is quiet, nothing but a fuzzy country station out of Baltimore to fill up their silence. Jensen doesn’t recognize the song, but Jared hums along like he knows it. Once, Jared fits his hand over Jensen’s where it’s clutching the gearshift—because of course Jensen will only drive stick—and squeezes once and lets go. But when Jensen glances over, blank with surprise, he’s looking out his window like nothing happened.

Jensen smiles to himself and drives a little faster.

When they get to the hotel, a classy one near the Capitol that Jensen let Danneel book for them, Jensen hands the valet the keys and trails Jared into the lobby. They don’t talk at the front desk, might as well be strangers there, and they follow proper elevator etiquette with eyes downcast and lips thin while the porter asks them if it’s their first time in DC, are they related, what brings them to the nation’s capital. Their suite is on the third floor. Jensen leans back against the glass wall and taps his foot offbeat of the elevator music, watching Jared fiddle with the little white envelope of key cards. 

He’s a little sorry that there are two cards, wishes for one so that one of them would be dependent on the other all the time. But he doesn’t want Jared to need him that bad, and he doesn’t want to be the one depending. It was a stupid thought, he scolds himself when they reach their floor.

They follow the porter down a stupidly long, straight hallway with impossibly plush carpeting. They are close enough that their elbows bump as they walk, even though they’re both turned away to squint at room numbers that get bigger on Jared’s side as they go forward and smaller on Jensen’s. But they find their room eventually.

Jensen knows it’s a two-bedroom suite. He was watching over his wife’s shoulder when she booked it, but it’s still a little shock when the bellhop opens the door, a keycard of his own, and reveals a small living space that opens off into two separate bedrooms. Both bedspreads are golden-colored, each perfectly matched to the beautiful suite. The furniture is sleek and dark, the walls painted eggshell white, and there’s a minibar and a huge television over a fireplace entertaining a clique of sofas and chairs.

Jared tips the bellhop, thanks him, leave the bags here we’ll deal with them ourselves thank you. Jensen leaves them to it and wanders deeper into the suite, over to the French doors that open onto a small balcony and the blustery, soupy day on the other side. The sky is gray and he can see the Washington Monument in the distance, as pale as the weather. He can see his reflection in the glass, a stupid look on his face and a scarf around his neck and Jared somewhere behind him shutting the door between them and the rest of the world. 

They stand there for a long time, just like that. Jared makes some sound and Jensen looks over at him, where he’s standing huge and gorgeous and slightly unreal over by the door. It’s only a couple of seconds but there’s no time in limbo, it could be a decade (it feels like it has to be at least that long), and then Jensen feels his face breaking into a smile. Jared scrambles over. The vase of real flowers on the console table is toppled, spreading water and white lilies across the carpet, but Jensen finds himself wrapped up in Jared before he can worry about it.

“This,” Jared murmurs against his neck. Jensen agrees, clenching his fingers in Jared’s coat and scrabbling as close as he can get.

This will be enough, he tells himself.

\--

A little more than a year earlier, around the time the Red Sox were finishing off the Indians on the way to their second ring in four years, Jensen invited Jared out for dinner. It was a normal weeknight, October cool and rainy, both of them settled into their situation.

“So did you get the invitation to Sandy’s Halloween party?” Jared asked, cheerful and relaxed, looking very good in a baby-pink shirt. Sandy was his scrub nurse, a tiny brunette who treated him like an ornery little brother who happened to be three times her size. “She reminded me about it the other day, during that cholecystectomy I was telling you about. I told her to send you an invite.” He took a long pull from his beer and grinned.

Jensen bit his lip and dodged eye contact. “So, uh, Danneel just found out she’s pregnant,” he blurted when he was sure Jared didn’t have anything in his mouth to choke on or spray all over the table.

Jared stared at him for a second like he couldn’t make sense of the words, and then he smiled a little crookedly. “Congratulations, man!” he said, and it even sounded like he really meant it.

“She just found out today,” Jensen explained. He leaned back in his chair and tried to crack his spine, having just come off a forty-eight that had made his brain feel like it was being turned into pudding, and his meds had worn off long enough ago that his hip throbbed dully with every heartbeat. He did not want to have this conversation, not now and not ever.

“Apparently, we’re going to have a little souvenir from Greece,” he added when Jared didn’t say anything, looking down at his hands and his fading tan. He fiddled with the edge of the sleeve of his sweater and stared at his wedding ring, wondering when and how everything had gotten so complicated.

They were at an Applebee’s not too far from Jared’s house, because Genevieve was down in Phoenix for something and Danneel was home. They had a basket of riblets demolished between them and two glasses of dark European beer leaching condensation onto cardboard coasters shaped like apples. They both ordered steak.

Jared leaned across the table and covered one of Jensen’s hands with his own much larger one. Jensen enjoyed the warmth and touch for as long as he dared before he slipped his hand out from under and fisted his napkin in his lap instead. Jared’s smile flickered.

“No, dude, I mean it,” said Jared, snaring eye contact and holding it. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” said Jensen.

“So. I’ve been thinking about going shopping for a ring soon,” said Jared after a moment. Something like surprise floated across his face, and it sounded a lot to Jensen like he was just saying whatever popped into his brain, talking just to talk and fill space and then saying something he did not expect. But then his mouth flattened out into a determined line and he soldiered on with the idea anyway. 

Jensen let him. “Congratulations,” he said, thinking, that was fast, you’ve only known her a year.

Jared nodded, looked vaguely ill. “What’re you doing tomorrow afternoon. I mean, I helped you find Danneel’s ring, and.”

“I’m free all day,” Jensen interjected, not up for the end of whatever Jared was going to say. He cringed at how gruff his voice had gone, self-preservation through low frequency, and he grabbed his beer to take a long drink. He met Jared’s gaze again and cleared his throat. He was in this now and he was going to commit to it. “We’ll go to every jewelry store in Northern California if we have to,” he said. “That ring’s gotta be perfect.”

Jared swallowed heavily and opened his mouth to say something, but then their waitress appeared with their meals, and he never got around to it after.

\--

In his heart of hearts, Jensen really is a simple guy. He likes beer and doesn’t care if it’s in a can, he’ll sit down to catch whatever game is on TV even if it’s something random like the Canadian Football League, and he sometimes spends an afternoon off working on his car. He loves his job, adores his family, and would do anything for his friends. In fact, the only complication in his life is Jared, but the fact is, the two of them have never sat down to try to untangle themselves or sort out their true and untrue, and he doesn’t know exactly what that means. 

It’s cold as balls out, the temperature even looks scary low in Fahrenheit, so they end up just watching the game on TV, both of them sprawled across the king size bed in the one bedroom with a pizza box between them. 

“I’mma grab another beer from the sink,” says Jared, levering up on his knees. “You want?”

“Sure,” says Jensen, barely glancing away from the screen, where the ‘Skins are just completely shutting down the Cowboys’ running game and winning easily. Time-out, and he turns to watch Jared head into the bathroom, shirtless and in his shorts, one sock drooping down his ankle. Jensen’s feet are bare, tucked up under a pillow to keep them from the chill in the room. He’s naked and wrapped up in a sheet.

The game ends, a double-digit point spread, and Jensen imagines that somewhere, Jessica Simpson is crying her eyes out.

He wants to say something, but he’s lazy and slow from beer, and when he goes to open his mouth he finds Jared kneeling next to the side of the bed and looking up at him all intensely. They share a smile, easy and comfortable, and then Jensen pulls him closer.

And it’s good. The best of the week, maybe too good. He’s got Jared spread out under him, all that skin bare and slick with sweat. Jared digs his fingers into Jensen’s upper arms, tendons standing out, and gasps, “Oh, Jesus, there.”

“Oh, where?” Jensen teases, canting his hips differently and pausing. Jared groans, mumbles something about don’t be a son of a bitch, which normally Jensen would take issue with but, well. 

“Come on,” Jared whines, trying to pull him forward again with feet digging into the backs of his thighs but he’s at a leverage disadvantage. Jensen grins, ducking down to kiss him before getting on with fucking the hell out of him, face pressed into Jared’s throat and both of them gasping.

Jared pulls his face up with one hand on his jaw and the other spanning the entire left side of his head, snaring and holding eye contact. Jensen can’t even make out his irises, pupils too huge and black. Jensen has to squeeze his eyes closed to try to keep some piece of his mind intact, that look is too much to withstand. “Do you even know?” Jared says. He rolls his hips up, squeezes his thighs against Jensen’s sides. “No, fuck, I don’t think you do. What you are, what you do to me. You don’t even know.”

They’re both close, though, and Jensen isn’t even really listening. Jared’s never quiet in bed (except when they’re trying not to get caught), says all manner of things. Sometimes they’re terrible, I hate yous, what are you doing to mes, this is all I needs. 

“What don’t I know, J?” Jensen asks, moving just so, deeper and slower, dragging out a long whimper. Jared lets go of his face and claws at his back, and Jensen knows he’s going home with marks.

“God, Jensen. Fuck, I love you. You don’t even. You don’t know, do you? No, you don’t, because we don’t talk and.” Jared gasps, then he grabs him by the hair, palms hot over his ears, and crashes their mouths together.

When he has some grip on reality again and the words filter in through the haze, he jerks back and stares at Jared, whose face has gone utterly hospital-white. Jared shoves him away with panicked, jerky movements as a look of horror spreads across his face. Jensen can’t watch him retreat, knowing without a doubt that something irreparable is broken now, something they have no hope of resuscitating, not with their hands or machines or magic. He busies himself with cleaning up, getting rid of the messy physical particulars. He rolls off the bed with a lurch and goes into the bathroom, autopilot kicking in like it does in the middle hours of a nineteen-hour labor. There are still three bottles of beer in the sink, suspended in slurry that’s mostly just cold water, almost no ice left. He splashes some of it on his face.

He can hear Jared rustling fabric, and he forces himself to stand in the bathroom doorway and watch as Jared yanks on the first pair of shorts he finds (Jensen’s) and flees. The door to the other bedroom shuts, not a slam but not a soft snick that isn’t any kind of punctuation.

Neither of them says a word.

\--

The first time Jared met Andy, Genevieve’s son, was after an A’s game in mid-August, only a month after meeting Genevieve. Jared’s immediate impression of the five-year-old was that he was absolutely and without question Genevieve’s child.

“He’s spent the last week with his dad, so he’ll be a bit… strange for a little while,” she explained in the car to the stadium, fluttering hands and sharp turns while she checked her makeup in the rearview mirror. Jared held on to the door and smiled stiffly. “And by strange I mean he’ll talk about things a five-year-old has no business talking about, maybe too much Discovery Channel with Daddy. And no, I’m not talking coming up and asking about the birds and the bees. I’m talking, ‘Mom, let me tell you about nebulas and human evolution and Shark Week and why the Bible is lying.’ And surfing, even though that’s a bad idea for everybody involved. And a hundred stories about the exploits of my team that I’d really prefer not to be privy to, because I love them and all, but dear god, I don’t need my five-year-old parroting back dead baby jokes. I’m sorry if I don’t want my child growing up to be a sociopath.” 

Jared, not sure how to respond to that, said, “What are the odds he’ll tell me some of those dead baby jokes? It’s fun to freak Jensen out with ‘em.” He thought it probably said a lot about Genevieve that she just laughed.

“Don’t be surprised if he doesn’t notice you for a while, though, is what I’m saying,” she said. “He spends a lot of his time around men your size, and you all kind of blend together after a while.” She paused, flashed a grin. “No offense.”

Jared didn’t remember too much of the game itself, too busy marveling at how different the Coliseum looked outfitted for baseball than for football (having watched his share of Raiders games with Jensen). Anyway, it was a dull game, the A’s beating the crap out of the Mariners while getting an excellent performance from their own starter. The seats were somewhere low on the third base side, closer to home plate than the home dugout and a few rows back.

“Your pitcher’s got a lot of vowels in his name,” he observed sometime in the middle innings.

“Yes, he does,” she agreed. “Eat your hotdog.”

“How do you say it? Saarloos?”

“Yes. Now seriously, eat your hotdog. They’re gross cold.” She paused and grinned. “I’m sorry. I’m used to trying to talk a very disinterested child into eating. God knows if he ever eats when he’s not with me. Want to know something cool? That guy two rows down and a couple seats over, with the notebook and the hat? Trying to look inconspicuous and so not a ninja? Scout. Probably for the Mets, maybe Boston. Somewhere with lots of money to throw at Zito in the offseason.”

“But he’s not pitching in this game.”

“S’that matter?” she asked. Jared figured she would know better than he would.

In the bottom of the eighth, she got a phone call and disappeared for a while, her voice exasperated even as she walked up the stairs away from their seats. Jared had by then noticed a theme in how she dealt with Andy’s father, annoyance and affection in fairly equal measures. When she returned with one out in the top of the ninth, she had a small brown-haired boy with her, the kid chattering away and gesturing widely with his free hand. It was a little strange to see Genevieve with her mouth closed for so long as she listened to her son.

Andy would be five at the end of the month and was a bit undersized for his age. He had big dark eyes and skinny limbs, and he didn’t really look a whole lot like Genevieve in the face. 

“And Dad says that when they get back we’ll go surfing and he might even get me my own board, like he promised he would during the Break and then didn’t,” he said as they reached Jared.

“And naturally he didn’t run this by me,” Genevieve muttered, rolling her eyes at Jared, more of the fond exasperation. “Kiddo, I think you’re still a little bit small for surfing on your own. How ‘bout you stick to what you do now, okay?”

“I’m not gonna bust my head open on a rock or nothing. I know what I’m doing,” Andy insisted. “And Dad’s been doing it, like, forever. And he wouldn’t let me die. Not on purpose, anyway. He doesn’t do anything on purpose.”

Genevieve took her seat and Andy crawled into her lap, happily raiding the bag of peanuts she’d left in the cup holder and not once looking away from the field. He let loose a long string of baseball talk that Jared couldn’t follow at all, which Genevieve nodded along with and commented on occasionally, and by the time he was finally quiet the game was over with a bow on the win.

“Andy, this is Jared,” said Genevieve as the team lined up for fist bumps and ass slaps of congratulations.

“The guy you met?” Andy asked, turning to Jared and squinting at him. “You’re really tall, aren’t you? I can tell even though you’re sitting down. I wish I was tall. Mom says I will be someday, ‘cause my dad is, just now I have to be okay with being the littlest kid in my class. I’m gonna start kinder… kindergarten in a week, you know. Oh, and hi.”

Jared smiled. “Hi.”

“I’m Andy.”

“I know. I’m Jared. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Andy’s eyebrows flickered. “Mom talks a lot. So does my dad. He says I come by it naturally.”

“You do, squirt,” said Genevieve, laughing. “You definitely do.”

But Andy had one thing in mind. “So Jared,” he said very seriously. “Do you know how to surf?”

\--

Jared sleeps a total of twenty-six hours during the first two weeks after he gets back from Washington, all of them at the hospital and all of them when he basically drops where he’s standing. Twice he falls asleep on a bed in a corridor with the hospital noise all around him. The Chief of Surgery bans him from the operating room until he gets himself on some Lunesta and stops wandering around looking like he’s going to spend his nights starting up underground fighting rings and rallying the service industry and imagining a cooler version of himself that looks like the sexiest man alive.

Gen has never slept much at night anyway, too used to middle-of-the-night phone calls from any number of the crazy men she has worked with over the years, snagging catnaps throughout the day. She takes to staying up with him all night, sitting in the kitchen and drinking cup after cup of coffee and using him as a sounding board for all of her complaints about Andy’s idiot manchild of a father, baseball’s broken economic structure, the sociopath she works for, and some television show she watches that has this female character she absolutely hates who’s apparently setting back feminism ten years just by having plush lips and the audacity to sleep with one of the male leads. 

Only once does she ask if he wants to talk about his tragedy, the first night she finds him sitting in the living room with the TV off and his insides out. He tells her no and she lets it go, starts talking about one of her baby pitchers who she thinks is going to go places in the future, and he’s happy to nod occasionally and pine silently.

Andy went to LA to be with his father for Thanksgiving and he’s still down there, surfing even though his father is contractually forbidden from doing it, and calling to gush about the desert and the bulimic his father is dating. Andy thinks it’s awesome how much food she can put away, and he’s a seven-year-old boy, so the purging part is fascinating to him, too, no matter how much Gen and Jared try to disabuse him of the idea.

“She’s sick, sweetie. It’s not ‘cool,’” Gen wheedles, speakerphone on while she washes the dishes.

“Dad said that, too,” says Andy, sounding annoyed. “But the barf! So much barf!”

Eventually, though, sleep comes back to Jared, even without drug therapy. The week before Christmas, Gen takes him upstairs and shoves him on the bed, swallows him down and it’s good. He doesn’t even close his eyes and pretend she’s anyone other than herself. Afterwards, he feels like something has knit back together, his sanity maybe, and then he immediately feels worse. And then they fall asleep.

The next Sunday she invites Jensen and Danneel over for dinner. Both of them show up looking wounded and gray, Danneel in particular looks like she’s just been released from a long stay at Guantanamo. Jensen is skinnier and his limp seems a little more pronounced than Jared remembered, but maybe he’s just given up on any ruse of wholeness he might have had once.

Gen’s dinner plans are all well and good, but she seems to forget that she’s worse than hopeless in the kitchen. Two pots boil over, something sets off the smoke alarm, and Jared’s ready to call the whole thing off when the doorbell rings.

There is awkward chitchat, the four of them crowded in the foyer, and then Jensen offers to go pick up some takeout since the dinner’s a wash. 

“Oh, good idea,” says Gen. “I’ll go grab the menus. Anyone want something to drink?”

“A drink sounds good. It feels like I swallowed a desert on the way here,” says Danneel, brightening a little. “I’ll come with you.”

Which leaves Jared and Jensen standing there, looking anywhere but each other. Jensen wanders over to the wall where there are family pictures: Jared in his San Diego State graduation robes mugging for the camera arm in arm with his brother, Andy looking like a Cabbage Patch Doll next to a laughing Barry Bonds, Genevieve in Jared’s arms and holding out her hand with the new ring in the lobby of the Bellagio, and several years of postseason celebrations with the boys who are closer to Genevieve than her biological family. Jared has nothing to say that doesn’t start with “I’m sorry, please look at me, forgive me, anything, this kills—” but then the wives come back, laughing about something. Danneel has a glass of iced tea in her hand, Gen has the shoebox full of menus they keep by the phone.

“So we were talking Indian,” says Danneel.

“Indian is fine,” says Jensen, leaning to get a closer look at one photo. Jared can’t tell which one it is, but he has a feeling it’s the one of the two of them, young and smiling and still in med school.

“As long as Jared doesn’t get that toxic green curry,” says Gen, smiling a little. “I’m not up to smelling that all night.” Everyone winces, no one feels like jokes. “God,” Gen sighs. “Look alive, people. This place is Deadsville, isn’t it?”

Jared thinks, nobody here is okay.

Once the order is phoned in and Jensen escapes to pick it up, Jared goes upstairs to get the good tablecloth out of the linen closet while the wives clean up the disaster area on the stove.

He can hear their voices even upstairs, Gen laughing a couple of times. It’s good to hear, Jared thinks, but she’s always been quick to laugh. She’s quick to laugh and quick to panic, reacts beautifully to anything anybody says to her. 

He finds the tablecloth and heads downstairs, leaves it on the dining room table and goes to ask which dishes to set the table with, but he stops in the hall outside the kitchen door when he finally notices what they’re saying.

“They’re each other’s backstory is all,” says Gen.

“And does that make all of this okay?” Danneel asks sharply. She sounds exhausted and sad. “Not so much, you know?”

“I know. This isn’t my first rodeo, Danneel,” says Gen, voice gentle and very soft. Jared perks up. “I was talking to one of my boys who’s been around a few years about it, and he was like, ‘Gen, you know what’s goin’ on, right?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, thanks, asshole. I guess I’m a slow learner or something.’ And that’s not even counting what my mother said to me when I tried to bring it up with her. And believe me, I wouldn’t bother bringing up anything heavier than the A’s record in May with her if it wasn’t worth my fucking life. And she said, ‘Now, see, Genevieve? You should’ve married Andy’s father when you had the chance.’ Because that would’ve saved _everybody’s_ problems.” Jared can hear her rolling her eyes, and he lets himself picture that instead of thinking too hard about the meat of what she’s saying.

“I’m opening the wine now,” says Danneel. “You mind?”

Gen snorts, and it sounds kind of humorless. “Pour me a glass, too,” she says. “They’re in the third cupboard, there.”

Jared braces himself against the wall, forehead on his forearm, wondering why he’s not interrupting. He hears the refrigerator door open as Danneel gets the pinot grigio out, the cupboard door clap closed and two pieces of stemware clink on the countertop.

“Is your mother difficult? Sounds like we have even more in common than we thought,” says Danneel after a long sip of wine.

“This is just cheese! How is it not coming up?” Gen snaps, scratching at something on the stove. “Why do I suck? Why does everything suck? Ugh.”

“Damn fine question,” Danneel agrees. “This wine is good. I think my new goal for the night is to drink myself blind.”

“We were up in Napa for something around Halloween,” says Gen. “Got a whole case of it, but I ended up giving most of it to my boys, to tell you the truth.”

“You wasted wine this good on baseball players? I despair of you.” Jared peels himself off the wall and takes a step toward the door, but then Danneel continues with an earlier thread, stopping him where he stands. “You want to know what the worst thing my mother ever said to me was? It’s pretty spectacular.”

“Is your mother a flaming shrew?”

“You have no idea. God. It was right after Jensen and I got engaged, we flew down to Baton Rouge so she and Daddy could meet him… oh, I guess this’ll need some backstory.”

“Well, Jared probably got distracted by something upstairs and your husband drives like an old lady, so. We got time. Here, hit me again. This is some damn good wine, isn’t it?”

Wine sloshes in a glass, two chairs screech on the tiles, two cushions huff protests against gravity.

“So my mother, she got married when she was seventeen, divorced my bio dad at twenty, went back to school with two little kids. So she’s this horribly jaded old hag, even though she totally married a lawyer and ended up living in a gated community and employing a household staff, for Christ’s sake. But whatever. She married my bio dad because she was stupid and young and in love and pregnant with me, and she married Daddy because she knew she was never going to be anything more than distantly fond of him, even though he adores her.”

“Isn’t that always the way?” says Gen, dryly. She sips her wine. Feeling abused and fanciful, Jared darkly entertains the thought that, on some level, she’s identifying with the woman in the story. He thinks it’s maybe more likely than he finds comfortable.

“And bio dad, he died when my brother and I were in high school. We went to his funeral, but I think that was mostly so Mom could dress us in expensive clothes and drive the Lexus, and show her old mother-in-law, ‘Look how I landed on my feet, in spite of your waste of skin son who used to beat me.’ Which, fair, you know? Anyway, on the way home from the funeral, driving home from N’Orleans, she and I get in this huge fight. She’s going on and on about her broken dreams or whatever, and I snapped. And she looks at me and says, “It’s not the smart girls who get to have love stories, Elta. Keep that in mind. Plan accordingly.’ And mind you, I’m fifteen, and a very romantic, _Pretty in Pink_ fifteen at that, so I’m pissed as all hell. And I shout, ‘Yeah? Well, I’ll have both!’”

“Good for you.”

“I never forgot it, though. ‘Smart girls don’t have love stories.’”

“That’s pretty terrible,” says Gen, breathless, the best audience in the world. Jared agrees with her.

“It really is, isn’t it? Way to be a feminist, Mother. But no, that’s not the worst thing she said to me. That’s not even on the list of worst things. So Baton Rouge, me and Jensen, new shiny rock on my finger. When was that, fall of ’05?”

“I measure my time in baseball,” says Gen. “Were the White Sox in the World Series?”

“Oh, hell if I know. Only thing I know about baseball is that they look good in those tight pants.”

“They look good out of ‘em, too,” Gen giggles. “I had a baby with one, you know.”

“I know. Smart girl.” Both of them laugh, sliding past tipsy and into drunk, while Jared slides down the wall and wraps his arms around his shins.

Gen stops laughing abruptly. “Not really,” she says. Danneel quiets, too.

“Anyway,” she says, and Jared can just picture her waving her hand and then curling it into a fist just under her chin. “So we’re at the house, this disgusting palace that Mother spends all her time redecorating instead of having a life, and Jensen’s charming and lovely, and Daddy adores him immediately. Mother is civil, which is as close to loving him on sight as she’s going to get. And after dinner Daddy takes Jensen to talk about boy things and Mother goes to do whatever she does after dinner, and I go to help Georgette, the housekeeper with the dishes because Georgie was, like, the only bright spot of my time in that house.”

“So wait. You come from, like, serious money.”

“Southern gentility, baby. Recognize.” They giggle again.

“See, that’s amazing to me. I don’t really know anybody who grew up with money. Everyone I know is, like, way nouveau riche. You should see some of these houses the players build their wives. Ri-dic-u-lous. There are fountains in the foyers in some of them, I shit you not.”

“Mother would say, ‘How gauche.’” Danneel snorts. “She’s really awful, Gen. You can’t even imagine. She sneers all the time, like the whole world offends her just by being ugly and outside her door, and she’d never in a million years admit how desperately miserable she is. It’s so stupid.”

“So there you go. There’s your walking cautionary tale. Don’t read your press, don’t drink the water, don’t become your parents—that’s all the advice in the world, you know?”

Danneel sloshes more wine in her glass. “Here’s to me,” she says. “Cheers!”

“Cheers,” Genevieve repeats. “So go on with your story. What did your mother say to you?”

“Oh! Right. So I’m helping Georgie with the dishwasher, telling her about what a wonderful man I’ve found myself, so caring and responsible and handsome and goddamn _sensitive_ , and she laughs. ‘Sensitive? You sure you’re goin’ places you wanna go?’ And then Mother comes in, says, ‘Georgette, could you give us a moment?’ and I want to say, ‘No, Georgie, stay, please. Don’t leave me with her.’ But Georgie just smiles and says yes ma’am to Mother and goes. And Mother stands there with her—oh, get this—her glass of white wine imperiously in her hand and she says, ‘Jensen seems nice.’ I smile, say, ‘He is nice, Mother.’ Because he is.”

“He is,” Gen agrees. “It would be easier if I could, like, hate him. I would be a happier person if I could.”

“Sing it,” says Danneel. Jared imagines her raising her glass in salute. “But no, Mother just gets this funny look on her face, almost sad. Disappointed, but not like she usually looks, which is like I’m embarrassing her by not being whatever it is she wants me to be. She actually looks sad for _me_ and not for her for once. And she says, ‘You know, I was holding out for you to pick love, Elta. But you went with smart.’ And then she sees what that does to me and she just leaves the kitchen, all, ‘Oh, I’d better go check on the boys, who knows what kind of trouble Daddy’ll get into. I don’t see your Jensen enjoying hunting so much, what do you think?’ while I just stand there, shaking, plate clenched in my hands so hard I cracked it. And then Georgette comes back in, pries the plate away and hugs me. ‘Don’t you worry yourself over her, baby girl. Whatever she said, and I know she said something horrible just now, just know it’s ‘cause she’s old and bitter and miserable.’”

Jared covers his mouth with one hand, appalled at himself for listening to this, eavesdropping like a gossip girl. His own mother always said, ‘You’ll never hear good things listening at doors,” but he was never a good listener. Not much good in conversation either, though. He knuckles his forehead, strains his ears for the sound of Jensen’s car in the driveway, but it’s just him in the hallway and the two women in the kitchen and no relief on its way.

“Who says that to their child, Genevieve?” Danneel continues, voice cracking terribly. “No matter how true or untrue it may be—and there’s a loaded question if there ever was one—who puts a voice to it?”

There’s a long pause. More wine pouring, the singing sound of someone dragging a licked fingertip around the rim of a glass, then Gen asking softly, “Was she wrong?”

Jared wheels to his feet and staggers around the corner, interrupting them, absolutely certain that he does not want to hear her answer. “Miss me?” he asks lamely, desperately. They both blink up at him then Danneel looks down into her glass.

“No,” she says.

\--

The only one of Jared’s roommates Jensen liked was Milo, who had spent most of his childhood in hospitals because of a congenital heart defect and wanted to become a cardiac surgeon as a thank you to the ones who saved his life. Milo could drink all of them under the table, which didn’t seem fair to the Irishman in Jensen or the giant in Jared, but whatever. Jared spent his internship year living with a group of real douchebags, but Milo was good people.

It was the summer of their intern exams. The two hospitals were on slightly different schedules, but by August they were all officially real doctors and they celebrated by going on a bar crawl.

Danneel was in New York, so Jensen had an entire week to lie around in his own filth with Jared, and they did. They had sex on just about every surface of the apartment Jensen shared with her, in a pretty building in one of San Francisco’s sunny neighborhoods, and then on Saturday they went out with Jared’s roommates and a couple of Jensen’s friends.

Milo was loudly telling the group a story about how he’d slept with his gross anatomy instructor in school for a better grade, which devolved quickly into a game of ‘Never Have I Ever’ that made Jensen really glad he didn’t have do deal with most of these people on a daily basis.

“I’ve never tried to suck myself off!” one of the guys Jensen didn’t know crowed.

Most of them drank on that one. In fact, one of Jared’s other roommates seemed extremely offended that the first guy had never done it. “But you have a dick!” he said, boggling.

“Yeah, and I know where it’s been. Don’t want that shit in my mouth,” the first guy cackled.

“Well, I’m sorry you got a dirty dick,” Milo announced, “but I have it on good authority mine is an exemplary specimen!”

“Dude, just ‘cause your mom says so don’t make it true,” Jared said, laughing.

“And if his mom’s sayin’ it, you know she’s just lying to make him feel better. You know his mom’s seen a lot of cock in her time,” Dirty Dick said. He whacked the guy next to him in the stomach and pointed at Milo. “Didn’t you tell us that your mom slept with your roommate during mom’s weekend when you were in undergrad?”

“Aw, fuck you guys,” Milo said, but he was grinning drunkenly.

Jared threw his arm around Jensen’s shoulders and leaned against him. “I want to tell you this before I get too drunk and forget and then don’t see you for another two weeks,” he said, breath hot against Jensen’s cheek.

“I applied for the surgical residency at University and they accepted me,” Jared said, grinning. “So starting on the first, I’m working under the same roof as you!”

“No shit?” 

“No shit!” Jared yelled back.

Jensen yanked him forward and kissed him.

\--

The rest of December passes quickly, then Christmas and New Year’s. Danneel goes a little crazy buying presents for Lila even though she’s too little to appreciate the whole thing, and then, two weeks into January she sits Jensen down at the kitchen table and purses her lips. She looks wrung-out, not polished at all, just old jeans and her hair scraped back in a ponytail.

“I think we should separate,” she says.

He raises his eyebrows, and it takes so much energy that he’s exhausted immediately. “Separate?” he asks dimly.

“Maybe even divorce. I don’t know. But this is broken.” She stares down at her hands, starfished on the tabletop. There’s a stack of gossip magazines to her left. The cover of the one on top has Zac Efron looking smug and pretty, which is easier too look at than the heartbroken, cracked open look on Danneel’s face.

“Oh,” says Jensen.

She sucks her teeth and fiddles with her wedding ring. “I wanted to wait until after the holidays and the whole Baby’s First Christmas extravaganza. ‘Til my mother was gone back to Baton Rouge.” She makes a face. She doesn’t get along with her mother terribly well.

He nods. He glances over his shoulder at the clock on the stove. It’s early afternoon and it’s weird not to be at the hospital, but he’s taking a sick day because the thought of going in and delivering babies and dealing with happy couples makes him a little homicidal. And ill.

“Jensen, I know you were having an affair,” she says quietly. She doesn’t look up, and her lashes cut thick black lines across her cheeks. She’s beautiful. “I’m not blind, and you weren’t exactly subtle.”

“It’s done now,” he says after a long moment. “It’s over.”

She shrugs one shoulder. “It’s never really over,” she says, then, “Does it matter? I love you, but I can’t—I don’t _want_ to just pretend that you’re here anymore. With me, I mean. It’s like you’re only most of the way gone, but I need you to either come back or be all the way gone, or I’m gonna go crazy.”

“I love you, too,” he says, covering her hands with his. She twists her wrists and threads her fingers tightly through his.

She finally looks up, and she’s got tears in her eyes. Luckily, she has the class to wear waterproof makeup, so there aren’t long black tracks down her cheeks. “I refuse to allow my daughter to grow up in a household where her parents can’t even look at each other. That’s what I was left, and I won’t. I just won’t. And if we keep this up, pretty quick we are going to hate the idea of each other.”

Jensen nods. He can’t think of anything to say.

Danneel gives him a fierce look. “This is the worst thing anyone has ever done to me, you know. It’s abominable, and I didn’t deserve it.”

He flinches. “I know,” he says. “Believe me, I know.”

“I used to tell myself it must be a nurse, maybe, or some pretty little Peds intern, but I knew that wasn’t true.” She extricates one of her hands and fiddles with the end of her ponytail, moving it from one shoulder to the other. “Then I used to tell myself, ‘but remember, he still picked you, Danneel. He still married _you_ ,’ like that made any difference at all. But you were already too gone by the time you even met me—I never should’ve brought you home that night at the club, you know?” 

She looks appalled at herself, pressing her hand to her mouth for a second and widening her eyes, but then she swallows and nods. Her eyes are bright. “This is my fault. I could see you were hurting over something huge and life-taking, the kind of something nobody gets over. But you were so good looking, and you had a good job, and you were so nice. And I was like, ‘Take that, Mother! I will have it all!’ I could always tell that I wasn’t what you wanted, so close but not quite it. But I stayed, I pushed, we got married. It was good, and then it was strained. Sometimes you would come home at weird times, hours after you should’ve left the hospital, and you changed your. Your cologne. And I knew. So we went to Greece to talk about our relationship and I thought we had a good time, agreed that there were things we couldn’t fix, ‘call it, doctor,’ and move on. But then—Lila. And here we are, and it’s four years later. Welcome to my life.”

The baby monitor Danneel carries with her from room to room crackles to life, perched on the counter next to the sink, but Jensen can hear Lila crying upstairs even without the speakers. She sounds scared and angry.

Danneel pulls her other hand away and she swipes furiously at her cheeks. “I should—”

“Let me, okay?” he says, rising before she can. She gives him a wobbly smile and he grabs a tissue from the box in the middle of the table, holding it out to her and thinking how it looks like a white flag.

It isn’t until he’s in Lila’s pink sunlit room, the prettiest room in the house, his arms full of unhappy baby, that he realizes that he’s got tears on his own face. “Shhh, Lila-dele,” he whispers, cheek to cheek with her and absorbing her tremors. “Everything’s gonna be all right, you’ll see.” As he tries to quiet his daughter’s cries, he kind of wishes somebody would yell when they leave him. Lila only cries louder, tiny hand gripping his collar, mouth open and wailing, and he wishes someone would give him the chance to yell back.

\--

Jared sent Jensen off on his honeymoon with a new bruise under the knob at the base of his neck and a fading one in the shadow over his left clavicle. He didn’t think Jensen even knew the marks were there, and he wondered what Danneel would think when she’d see them. Truthfully, Jared didn’t care.

When they got back from their week in St. Thomas, Danneel’s skin was very brown and her hair a paler rose-gold than usual, while Jensen was a shade of pinkish-tan Jared had never seen on him before, peeling in places and more freckled than he’d been when he left. He looked like he’d caught up on some of the sleep debt he’d been accruing steadily since high school.

“You ever get married, man,” Jensen said, shoving Jared against a wall in an empty on-call room his first day back at the hospital, “I’m fucking you through a wall at your own wedding, then I’m sending you off with a hickey that fucking hurts if you even think about touching it, okay?”

“Who the fuck am I going to marry?” Jared had snapped, ripping his shirt over his head and pulling Jensen toward the bunk by his hips.

Jensen batted his lashes and laughed a little harshly, but the flush on his cheeks and the reverent way he ran his hands over Jared’s chest said something different, and that was really all Jared heard. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “But remember what I said.”

“I’m holding you to it,” Jared promised.

\--

Jensen moves into a hotel near the hospital and he sees his daughter every weekend, trying not to make the baby transfer into a business transaction. Danneel isn’t interested in money or property, since she was the one bringing it to the marriage in the first place, and she refuses to fight.

“I don’t have any interest in a pound of flesh,” she says one Friday evening, half in her car while Jensen juggles Lila and the diaper bag and says goodbye. 

Honestly, the whole thing is easier than it should be. After a while, it’s not even all that bad. The worst of it leaches away by February, plenty of babies to deliver and hysterectomies to perform, work a good distraction, and the hospital is large enough that he never has to see Jared except for one freak case that requires a general surgeon. And even then, they’re both far more interested in the patient’s ectopic pregnancy and its location than they are in each other. 

“Her spleen, Ackles,” says Jared, looking amazed above his surgical mask. “Her _spleen_. The fertilized ovum managed to not only not implant in her uterus, but completely miss the tube and then somehow end up implanting _on her fucking spleen_. How does that even happen?”

Jensen stares down into the retracted body cavity and just shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says honestly. “I’ve never read anything like it.”

Sandy, Jared’s lovely little scrub nurse, clears her throat. “Y’all will be writing a paper on this,” she says. “You don’t have a choice.”

Jared nods. “Well, fucking hell,” he says.

“Might want to get on stopping the bleeding now, though,” Sandy adds helpfully.

Jensen spends a lot of time considering developing a drinking problem, but he has a feeling that the answers aren’t floating in a bottle of vodka. He figures his father and the man’s Irish whisky habit might have some insight, though.

“Oh, man up, Jensen,” says Dad when Jensen gets him on the phone one afternoon. He’s in his office, trying to research other such extreme cases of ectopic pregnancy on his lunch hour and Dad is, predictably, unsympathetic. “Divorce ain’t fun for anybody.”

He wants to ask how the hell Dad knows, being a widower who remarried quickly and all, but he doesn’t bother. He likes to think that he’s old enough by now to refrain from picking a fight with his father every time they talk.

There was a similar case in Kentucky a year earlier, the only one in the last decade, and a handful of others worldwide over the years. He thinks about telling his father about it, this amazing medical rarity that Jensen gets to be a part of, but he’s not really equal to the task of trying to explain it.

“Now, how you managed to let a hot little piece like that go, I don’t know,” Dad continues. “You always were a peculiar kid.”

“Thanks, Dad,” he says dully.

“I’m just sayin’ that I always kinda wondered about you, kid.” Jensen pinches the bridge of his nose and exhales slowly. “You were a surly kid, never smiling, kinda gloomy, too stuck in your books most of the time. Then you fucked off to California for school, and then the accident… Look, I know, Jensen. But Lord’s honest truth, the only time I can remember you bein’ really, genuinely happy was that one time Gina and I flew out to see you while you were in medical school.”

Jensen closes his eyes, feeling a headache starting to pound to life behind his eyes. He doesn’t have anything to say to that, but luckily his pager goes off and he doesn’t have to. “Dad, I’m getting paged,” he says. “One of my patients wasn’t dilating like she should and I guess she is now. Gotta go.”

“Just think about what I said, Jensen. Okay?”

He doesn’t think about it, though. He works harder and smiles less. Two or three nurses start avoiding him, one of them refusing to work with him at all. Misha, his chief resident, seems to think that he’s developing an eating disorder, and seems to have made it a personal mission to make Jensen eat. Of course, it’s usually granola or soysage or bean sprouts, because Misha is ninety percent hippie, but Jensen appreciates the gesture.

And then, the last weekend of February, he’s just sitting down at the table in his hotel room to eat takeout pad Thai and watch college basketball when his cell phone buzzes to life. He’s a little confused when the name on the display is Gen Padalecki, but he answers.

“Hello?” he asks cautiously.

There’s a scuffling sound, a dead air pause that goes on long enough that Jensen has time to consider and discard several wild theories about what could be wrong, then Genevieve is saying, “Jensen?” in a terrible, weak voice.

“I’m bleeding really bad, Jensen,” she says. “I’m just home from Phoenix for the weekend, and Jared’s up in Seattle for some conference and I can’t get a hold of him and—I’m scared. I feel like a character in a bad horror movie and all I want to do is run upstairs and hide in the closet even though I fucking know that’s—it hurts—even though I know that’s where the guy with the chainsaw is going to be. Oh—Jensen, what do I do?”

“How far along are you?” he asks, closing his eyes and setting his dinner away, because of course when his life is coming apart, Jared’s comes together.

“About nine weeks, I think,” she says softly, and then she dissolves completely into wet, painful sounding sobs.

“I’ll be right there, Gen, okay? Sit tight.”

He still has a key, and he lets himself into the house fifteen minutes later, which is saying something considering the Padalecki house is a good half-hour away from the hotel. He finds her upstairs, curled up in the middle of the big bed. The sheets are spotted red.

“How long have you been bleeding?” he asks, all business and clinical pleasantry, picking her up. She wraps her arms around his neck and clings.

“A few hours now,” she squeaks.

He grimaces, and he’s glad she’s not looking at his face. He wraps her up in a blanket and carries her down to the car, appreciating for perhaps the first time how incredibly tiny she is. He’s never thought about it before, not really, but now all he can think is how Jared manages not to break her. After she’s settled in the passenger seat, cheek pressed to the glass, he goes back into the house and throws a few things into a bag.

He sits with her and holds her hand when they get to the hospital. She won’t let go long enough for him to do the examination, so he has a nurse pull Misha in to do it. He keeps her talking about Spring Training during the exam, distracting her with questions about the Romper Room chaos of camp, what’s the team like after all those trades, is Andy still down with his dad?

“I’m sorry,” says Misha, interrupting and scooting back, shaking his head and looking very grave. “It’s too late now. Do you want me to go through your options, or do you want Jensen—”

“Give her a minute,” says Jensen, putting a hand on Misha’s shoulder. Misha nods and shucks off his gloves, tossing them in the hazardous waste bin.

“Take your time,” he says softly, squeezing Jensen’s upper arm on his way out of the room.

Jensen sits with her and cries with her, and then, after they go through her options, he does the procedures because she refuses to let anyone else near her. And when it’s all over and she’s alone in her body again, he sits next to her on the bed and lets her cry into his chest while they wait for her husband to fly down from Seattle. The tearstain she leaves on his scrubs covers his entire deltoid, up to his collarbone and past the hollow above his bicep. 

Jared finally rushes in nine hours after Misha finally got him on the phone, twelve hours after Genevieve called Jensen, still in his pajamas like he didn’t even bother to change before he headed for the airport. The first thing he does is wrap Jensen in a crushing hug, quick and tight and released immediately, and Jensen just watches Genevieve. She won’t let Jared in the bed, will barely even look at him, but she does eventually concede to letting him sit nearby and stroke her hair where it falls across the pillow. Jensen excuses himself, turning away quickly and scrambling for the door handle, missing twice before he can latch on.

He doesn’t get ten feet from the door before he hears Jared’s footsteps behind him, and he’s not even fully turned around before Jared grabs him by the shoulders and spins him. He doesn’t have time to so much as blink before Jared puts a huge hand on either side of his face, tugs him forward and kisses him as hard as he can, teeth clacking and ringing pain through his head, right there in the corridor in front of the nurse’s station. Jensen lets it happen for about ten seconds, too surprised to think, and then his brain kicks in and he shoves Jared away, rearing back to follow she shove with a punch. 

He drags the back of his hand over his mouth and snarls at Jared. “What the fuck was that?”

The corridor is silent, horrifyingly unusual for nine o’clock in the morning. He tries very hard not to look around, tries to ignore his coworkers stuck in place with shocked looks on their faces.

Jared glances over his shoulder at the door to his wife’s room. “It was a thank you,” he says, sounding out of breath.

“What?” Jensen wants to break windows, cheekbones, his own knuckles. He takes a deep breath, and that helps a little to kill the fury. “That was not a thank you, you son of a bitch,” he says quietly, shaking his head. He avoids eye contact with everyone and looks down at the backs of his hands, which are steadier than they’ve been in years. There’s another scar on his right wrist, small and silvery right there at the base of his thumb, a good place to focus. He ignores the way Jared’s shoulders stiffen. 

“Jensen, I—”

“That was not a thank you and you know it,” Jensen snaps, suddenly very tired of all of this and looking for the trapdoor that will get him far away. He drags his eyes back up to Jared’s face. “That was a _fuck you_ , and that is _the_ most unfair thing you’ve ever done to me, which is saying a goddamn lot.”

Jared blinks, raising a hand and looking stricken, like he’s the big victim here. And maybe he is, having just lost a child and all, but Jensen looks in himself and finds that he doesn’t have a lot of sorrow for Jared. “What? No, Jensen.”

“You know what? No,” says Jensen, backing up. “You don’t get to do this.” He turns and walks the other way. He passes Misha and ignores the disturbed look on his face, darts his eyes away before Misha can snag a glance.

He makes it to the stairwell around the corner before his legs give up on holding him up, big dramatic exit adrenaline draining out of him in a whoosh like an aerosol spray. Nobody bothers with the stairs when the elevators are working, so there isn’t anyone around to see him sink down on the sixth step and put his head in his hands. 

He doesn’t even know what he’s crying about.

He sends Gen flowers, bright, cheery yellow tulips planted in a big pot. He doesn’t sign the card, and he pretends they’re new to him, what lovely anonymous flowers, when she shows them off when he comes in to discharge her. Jared isn’t around.

\--

“So this is your idea of a bachelor party?” Jensen asked. He stopped in the doorway, arching one eyebrow and looking around the hotel room, the beach visible through the French doors on the other end of the room. “Some best man you are. Where are the strippers? The obnoxious man-friends? The cheap beer and tequila shots? Where is my balloon hat shaped like a cock?”

Jared laughed and turned around to look at him, grinning and just enjoying the way Jensen’s white button-down was open to show off his throat, incredibly endeared with him at that moment. “Fine, if you want to call a bunch of assholes you hate and go out and get smashed and collect random women’s underwear and have strangers draw dicks on your face, fine.” He grins. “I mean, I was thinking it might be more fun with just the two of us staying here and seeing what we can do with that bed over there, but…”

He took a few steps, closing up the space between them. Jensen blinked, fish-mouthed for a second, then he threw his head back and laughed. “I’m kinda dense, huh?”

“Yeah, well,” said Jared, distracted. He pulled him in, an arm around his neck to bring their faces close together.

“How the fuck did you get a nicer room than me, anyway?” Jensen grumbled, clawing a hand up Jared’s back under his shirts, fingertips cold as they ever were against skin. Jared shivered.

“I flirted with the concierge,” said Jared, grinning like he knew exactly how that was going to push Jensen’s buttons. “That poor man was putty in my hands with one flash of the dimples.”

Jensen growled and shoved him away. He skidded his fingers through his hair, trying to flatten it back into some order, looking around the room. It was nice and big, airy and high-ceilinged, a huge bed Jared couldn’t wait to mess up fucking Jensen back and forth across it, an overstuffed couch nearby. There were strawberries in a silver bowl on the bedside table, and champagne on ice.

“You. You have this whole thing planned out, don’t you?” Jensen asked, coming up short when he saw the champagne and looking over at Jared with a small, pleased smile.

“Oh, fuck yes I do,” Jared said, grinning back. He grabbed Jensen by the waist and walked him backwards until the backs of his knees hit the couch, then he followed him down and fit himself over him like a second layer of skin. Jensen arched into him and reared up to kiss him, missing his mouth a little, but Jared righted the angle and held him down with a hand in his hair. “You want to hear about the things I’m going to do to you?” he whispered into Jensen’s ear.

“How ‘bout you just show me as we go?” Jensen suggested, rucking Jared’s shirt up and sinking his fingers into the bunched muscles bared s the fabric lifted. Jared grinned down at him and sat up a little to tug the shirt up over his head to toss it somewhere away. Jensen pulled him back down by the back of the neck and sealed their mouths together.

“Too much clothing,” Jared muttered, breaking the kiss. He sat back on his heels, straddling Jensen’s thighs, and made fast work of the buttons of Jensen’s shirt, though, and spread it open.

“Pants. Now,” said Jensen, rearing up and shucking his shirt.

“God, the things I’m going to do to you,” Jared murmured, pressing him back to the mattress with his hands curled over his shoulders. “I’m going to fuck you so hard you’re going to be thanking every god you can think of tomorrow that you’re not the one who has to walk down that aisle. You good with that?”

Jensen grinned, thinking that’s exactly how he wanted it. “Best bachelor party ever.”

 

 

Sandy is Jared’s favorite scrub nurse. She’s tiny and dark-haired, cute where Genevieve is more sultry, but they still look similar enough that he has a hard time looking her in the eye sometimes. She’s too smart for her own good, too, knows him too well, and she cares.

They’re scrubbing in for an appendectomy a few days after Gen’s miscarriage, Sandy babbling about some cute thing her dachshund did the night before, when she stops dead in the middle of a sentence and grabs his hand under the water.

“You have to stop this, Jared,” she says, squeezing his fingers.

“What?” he asks, glancing between their joined hands and her face, which is practically glowing with concern and affection.

She smiles sadly. “You have the biggest hands out of everybody I know. I can barely wrap my whole hand around one of your fingers,” she says, holding up his right hand to demonstrate. She’s right. “I always love working with you because I can watch your hands.”

He gives her a funny look. “Um, okay.”

“You don’t have surgeon’s hands to look at ‘em. But they serve you well.” She hands him the soap and shakes her head. “You’re not eating, are you? I can tell by your hands, you know. And your face, and how your scrubs fit. You’re a big man, so it takes a while to show up, but I can see it. What ever it is that’s so wrong in your world, sweetie? It’s not worth getting sick over,” she says, finally releasing his hand. She looks up and gives him a doe-eyed look that he can’t withstand. “You’re miserable.”

“We just lost a baby,” he says defensively, lathering up to his elbows. “I defy anyone to not be a little miserable after that.”

Sandy stares at him for a moment, then she shakes her head, rinsing off her own arms and flicking excess water into the basin. “That’s a real good reason, and it makes me sound like a big ol’ asshole for not believing you one bit.”

“I really wish everyone would quit telling me I’m lyin’ when I talk,” he says bitterly.

She gives him a look he doesn’t want to deconstruct, and she turns off the water and grabs the box of sterile gloves. “You ever think it might be time to start wondering why people keep saying that?” she asks, raising her eyebrows.

He sighs and looks through the window into the operating room, where the anesthesiologist he hates is talking to a group of nurses and one of Jared’s interns. “Honestly?” he says. “No.”

“Left hand,” says Sandy, shaking her head. She snaps the latex a little harder than he thinks is strictly necessary. 

\--

Not too long after Jensen and Danneel got back from Greece, he got to talking about things with Misha. The topic had been their lunches, eaten at four in the morning in front of the TV in Misha’s office, but somehow that got warped completely. _Some Kind of Wonderful_ was on, which was apparently Misha’s favorite John Hughes movie, not the most appropriate backdrop for an emotional postmortem.

“You want to know what I think?” Misha asked, giving him a grim look.

“No,” said Jensen, picking half-heartedly at the remains of the reuben he brought up from the cafeteria. The bread was soggy and the whole thing kind of sucked, but it was better than the vile-smelling thrice-heated falafel Misha was cheerfully finishing.

“Ha,” said Misha, rolling his eyes and setting down his fork. He had a smear of tahini dressing on his cheek. “You, my friend, are full of shit.”

Jensen shrugged. He fiddled with his ring. “I love my wife.”

Misha frowned. “Nobody’s saying you don’t. It’s not mutually exclusive.”

“Right, apparently this is just one of those weirdo ‘verses where that means jack shit.”

“But seriously,” said Misha a second later, shoving his plate away and sighing like he was going to have to explain the intricacies of the human kidney to a kindergartener. “Look at yourself, Jensen. Something is going to give, and it’s going to be a gory fucking mess and you know it.”

“I know. Believe me, I know.” Jensen peeled the top piece of bread back from his sandwich and picked off a chunk of corned beef. He chewed it slowly and swallowed before he looked back up. There was some thousand island on his fingers and he could feel a speck of sauerkraut stuck to his chin. Misha rolled his eyes and handed him a napkin.

“This is not healthy, this thing you’re doing,” said Misha. He looked concerned. Jensen rolled his shoulders and ate another piece of meat.

“You want to know something?” he said. He tossed the crumpled napkin next to his plate and sat back, arms crossed over his chest. “We’re probably going to separate.”

Misha did a spit-take and kind of twitched, his elbow slipping clean off the edge of his desk with a painful scraping sound. “What?”

Jensen dragged his hand through his hair and huffed out a breath, too late thinking that he probably still had thousand island all over his fingers. “We went on this vacation to see if we couldn’t maybe work through some of the problems. The ones _we_ could fix anyway, not the other stuff. The, you know, cocksucking stuff.”

“Comrade, you truly have a way with words,” said Misha, laughing so hard he was kind of purple.

“Yeah. Not a lot she can do there. Not that it came up, but Christ, she’s not an idiot. She can’t not know, right?” He shook his head. “But no, we had dinner in this little restaurant that’s basically a shack on a rock, and I think we just decided that it was hopeless to continue as we are.”

“Jensen, I gotta ask this, so don’t get pissed, okay?” Misha gave him a very stern look, head tipped forward just enough that he had to look up at Jensen. “But, seriously, why did you marry her in the first place?”

Jensen opened his mouth, thinking it would be such an easy answer, but somehow nothing came out, throat clogging up with nothing. He stared at a caraway seed poking out of the top piece of rye on his sandwich and shook his head.

“She’s beautiful, you know?” he said finally. “And she’s amazing. And she was there.” He couldn’t quite believe that everything wrong with his life boiled down to that, that proximity was the root of all evil. He had to laugh a little, actually, because how could he not? 

Misha’s frown deepened, two parallel lines sketching across his forehead like gutters on a bowling lane. “Asking for trouble, man,” he said.

“Yeah, well. And she loves me. She really does. And I love her. She makes me happy to be around, makes me want to take care of her and keep her happy. I love her.” He folded his arms on the edge of the desk and put his head down, rattling a deep sigh around in his chest.

Misha muted the TV and didn’t say anything for a few moments, long enough of a pause that Jensen looked up to see what was keeping him. Finally, Misha nodded and gave him a sad smile. “I hate to break this to you, buddy, but you’re _in love_ with somebody who isn’t your wife.”

Jensen jerked in his seat, shying toward the door. “What.”

“Please tell me this isn’t news to you,” Misha implored, staring at him pityingly. He took another bite of his falafel, chewed thoughtfully for a moment with the whole chunk bulging one cheek like a hamster with a baby carrot. “Jensen. Seriously.”

“Me and him, it’s always just been,” said Jensen, watching the screen so he didn’t have to look at Misha. “We don’t talk about it. I don’t even know if he, like, does this with other guys. I don’t know if he’s ever been with another guy besides me, though I gotta guess he has.”

“So it’s like Fight Club. Your own little gay sex Fight Club. Well goddamn.”

Jensen slumped in his chair, covering his face with one hand. “She deserves better than me.”

\--

Jared wakes up from a nap full of bad dreams, gasping awake on the couch, sounds down the hallway, closet doors, some kind of scraping noise on the hardwood. He sits up and wipes at his eyes, wondering what time it must be and how soon he’s got to head to the hospital.

He finds Gen in their bedroom, in the closet, a suitcase laid open like an autopsy on the bed. 

“What’re you doing?” he asks muzzily.

She looks up, startled. “Oh, you’re home,” she says.

“Was nappin’ in the living room,” he says, stretching his arms over his head, hooking fingers on the doorjamb. 

“I’m packing,” she says, not much inflection. She turns and tosses a pair of fawn colored pants onto the bed.

He scratches his head. “I see that. Um, why?”

“Because I’m going back to Phoenix.”

“You can tell Billy Beane to go fuck himself,” says Jared, dropping his arms and snorting.

“It’s cute how you think this is his idea,” she says coolly. “God forbid Genevieve have a mind of her own, right? Not where the ballclub is concerned.”

He ignores the obvious argument, that if one of her ballplayers or Beane or, fuck, some minor leaguer half a country away, calls and says jump, Gen laughs and asks how high and how far and if she should post bail or buy Motrin. He just says, “Are you absolutely sure?”

She keeps grabbing things from the closet. “I’m sure,” she says, voice muffled by the mound of clothing in her arms. “I have to do something that gets me out of this house. I have to get back to work, and this time of year, work for me is in Phoenix. With my team.”

He drags his hands through his hair, shoving it back away from his face. “Gen, you just had a miscarriage,” he says, trying a different tack. “You do not need to go back to work yet. As a doctor, I strongly discourage it.”

She shakes her head and drops the pile on the bed next to her suitcase. The jersey on top is a brand-new Garciaparra, not even worn yet. “Well, you’re not my doctor, are you?” she says. 

“You want me to call Jensen? Because I will.”

“You will not,” she says, shaking her head and starting with the folding of her clothes. “Look, Jared. You don’t understand. You get to go and escape to the hospital and distract yourself, cutting people open and rearranging their insides and stuff. I’m stuck here in this fucking house, all by myself all day because my son is hundreds of miles away from me right now. All I have to do is sit around and think and cry, and I cannot do that to myself anymore.” She tosses a few shirts aside, deciding against them at the last minute. One of them is a jersey with the number 99 and _Cortese_ on the back, which makes him smile. “Not how I’m built. I gotta be useful or I’m going to lose my mind.”

“So... what, then,” he says, tone going hard and cold, “you’re just going to get on a plane and go play with a bunch of overgrown children? Is that it?”

She looks up sharply, balling up the shirt she had been folding and pegging a perfect strike into his sternum, snarling. “Don’t you _dare_ ,” she says furiously. “I am an assistant to the Director of Player Personnel. My job is goddamn important to a bunch of people. Some of these men—and they _are_ men, you jealous pathetic little child—some of them are closer to me than brothers.” She shoves some hastily folded shirts into the suitcase, stopping after a few and turning back to him. “I’ve watched some of them grow up from scared little draftees straight out of some backwater high school to starting at the goddamn Coliseum. Sometimes all they want from me is a hug and a fucking peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

Jared draws back like he’s been struck. He barely recognizes the terse, spitting creature that’s taken over his wife’s body, not liking the way grief has twisted her face. “Genevieve—”

She shakes her head, deflating a little, pivoting in place and holding up a hand. “I need this, Jared.”

“It’s too soon, Gen,” he says.

“It wasn’t soon enough,” she snaps back. She shakes her head and turns away, starts selecting underwear from her drawer. “This is not a discussion,” she says, voice fading back to calm and resolute, even though she was shaking and visibly held together with Scotch tape and chewing gum, bursting at the seams. “I’ll be back on Tuesday, though I’ll have to head back down on Thursday.”

“Funny, this feels an awful lot like you’re leaving,” he says, much more bitterly than he intended. He grabs her arm, squeezes until she glares up at him. “Come, on, don’t do this, Jens—”

Her whole body jags away as she catches the slip a second before he does. She exhales heavily through her nose. “Jared,” she says softly, laying a hand on his chest. “Just. Space, okay? Let’s stretch it out, see if it sticks. Go golfing with Chad. Make fire, grill meat. Get drunk. Something.”

He glances at the bed and flinches. She ducks around him and drops a load of brightly colored panties into her suitcase, then she closes the lid and zips up the sides. He steps out of the way so she can leave the room, and one of the wheels on the suitcase just barely misses running over his bare toes. She pauses in the hallway, a door down in front of Andy’s room, and looks back at him.

“I’ll be back again in a few days, and I think you and I both know we have some things to talk about then,” she says. She uses her free hand to tuck her bangs behind one ear. He opens his mouth to protest but she just shakes her head. “I just can’t anymore, Jared. I just can’t.”

Once she’s gone, the taxi she called while he was asleep ferrying her away to the airport, he turns and punches the wall. It leaves one hell of a dent.

\--

Danneel was sprawled out on their beach blanket, eyes closed behind her big Jackie-O sunglasses, one hand curled over the spine of her discarded paperback. Jensen was more than a little jealous that she could just lie out in the Greek sun wearing nothing but that tiny bikini bottom and have absolutely no fear of blistering to a rich, crustacean red. Jensen huddled miserably in the fetal position under a rental umbrella, still in his t-shirt, though he did concede to rolling his pant legs and burying his toes in the sand.

“Would you relax,” she growled, not opening her eyes or even sitting up.

“I am relaxed,” he protested.

“I can hear you freaking out about skin cancer from here,” she said. “Just lie back and close your eyes. Listen to the gulls.”

He stared out at the water, fiddling with the thong of one of his sandals and thinking about how the unearthly blue of the Aegean made him nervous. “What? No. I’m fine,” he said.

“Is it your hip?” she asked, leaning up on her elbows and lifting her sunglasses to give him a mildly concerned look.

He shifted a little, testing and stretching the muscles from his ribcage down to his knee. “Not really, actually,” he said, honestly a little surprised. “Huh. Doesn’t hurt today.”

“That’s good,” she said, giving him a smile. She sat up a little more. “See, when we actually make love regularly, you don’t seem to have problems. My vagina is magic.”

He snorted and tossed his shoe back to the sand. “That must be it,” he said.

She rolled her eyes and dropped her glasses back down her nose. He watched her breasts jiggle as she moved her arm. She really was a spectacular woman, he thought, and he had never wished harder that he could just give her everything. “Glad we figured that out,” she said, scooting over and wrapping one arm around his lower back, pressing her cheek against the rounded muscle of his shoulder. He lifted his arm and pulled her closer.

“You ever going to tell me what happened?” she asked after a second of watching two sea birds fight over a scrap of food a few feet down the beach.

“The accident, you mean?” he asked. 

She nodded, lightly tracing patterns on his stomach with her nails. “Jared said something about you getting crushed under a Honda when I asked him one time,” she said.

He bit his lip and nodded. He kissed the top of her head and kept his eyes on the horizon. “That’s about it,” he said. “I spent about three months in the hospital, and then rehab. I’m lucky I can walk at all,” he reported dully.

There were lots of things he could have told her about it. He could have told her about how he was the only survivor of the crash, or that it was the fact he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt that saved him. He could have described lying in the street, pinned under the other driver’s Honda but still conscious enough to watch his roommate's Nissan burst into flames. He could have said that he watched two people he loved die, but he didn’t.

She reached up and carded her fingers through his hair, which was tipping with gold from all the sun he couldn’t avoid. “Let’s head back to the room, okay?” she whispered.

\--

Jared is drunk. Really, stupidly, blindly drunk.

He’s been keeping tabs on Jensen, though he refuses to think of it as creepy. He’s just making sure that the guy’s okay. He kind of hopes Jensen’s doing the same for him, but he doubts it. In fact, he has a feeling that this is going to end with him walking half a block and getting a possibly broken nose checked out in his own ER once Jensen opens the door and punches him.

The man behind the bar in the lobby of Jensen’s hotel is pretty obviously bored to tears by Jared’s sad, stupid story. Jared figures that the guy probably hears plenty of guys and their sob stories about how their wives left them, but he’s too drunk for anything other than perfect egocentrism.

“No more for you, buddy,” the bartender says. “You got somebody you can call or d’you want be to call a cab?”

“I know somebody upstairs,” Jared says, lurching to his feet and stretching his arms up over his head.

The bartender looks dubious. “You sure?”

Jared nods. “Room 462,” he says, smiling serenely.

He heads for the bank of elevators and waits with an elderly couple and two giggling teenage girls. He stumbles a little getting off the elevator, which is concerning, so he decides to take a few minutes to sober up. He sits down on a big, squashy couch in a small seating area to the left of the elevators. There’s a huge plate glass window overlooking the avenue below, the lights of the cars smearing into a long yellow and red line in both directions. It’s raining.

It’s probably half an hour that he sits there watching the cars go by. A family with noisy children gets off the elevator and heads the opposite direction of Jensen’s room, though the mother pauses and eyeballs Jared like she thinks he might be a threat. He ignores her. A man with a loud voice and a cellphone comes from that same direction and jabbers loudly about Nielsen ratings while he waits for the elevator to come. A group of college-age girls comes stumbling home, drunk and tired from a night on the town.

Jared waits until the sound of their giggles disappears down the corridor, and then he hoists himself to his feet. He walks evenly, no tripping over nothing, no weaving, no holding onto the walls. He moves with purpose and he knocks on the door with purpose.

He can hear the television on in the room, and it goes silent after the knocks.

“Hang on,” Jensen yells.

A few moments later, the sound of a deadbolt being thrown, some rustling, and the door cracks open.

Jensen stands there, gorgeous and tired and real, staring at him blankly. Jared looks down, first at the plaid flannel pants he’s wearing and then at the faded San Diego State t-shirt with the stretched out neck. Jared has wondered where that shirt got to, but he should have known. It always looked better on Jensen, anyway.

“What do you want?” Jensen asks. His voice is very carefully neutral.

“I want to—we need to talk.”

Jensen shakes his head and makes a face. He scratches his right ear and squints unhappily at Jared. “At one-thirty Tuesday morning?”

Jared glances down the hallway at the sound of the elevator beeping. “Can I come in?”

“I’d rather you not,” Jensen says.

“I don’t want to have this—the conversation we need to have.” Jared pauses and rakes his hands through his hair. Jensen continues to stare at him with no expression on his face. “Look, can we not do this out in the hallway so that everyone on the floor can hear it?”

Jensen sighs and takes a step back, waving vaguely over his shoulder. “Come on,” he says. “You’re right. Let’s not do this out here.” He sounds annoyed.

Jared brushes past him into the room, and Jensen’s just so warm and familiar and everything he wants, and it takes just about all his mental faculties not to just lean in and enjoy it. He leans against the wall and watches as Jensen closes the door.

“I’ve missed you,” Jared says. Jensen freezes, hand still on the lock. “I just thought you should know that.”

“That isn’t fair, Jared,” Jensen says after a moment, turning around and glaring at him.

“It’s the truth,” Jared insists.

“Fuck you, Jared.” Jensen shoots him a disgusted look and goes deeper into the room. 

Jared looks around before following him. It’s nice enough but generic, with soft goldenrod-colored wallpaper and walnut furniture, prints of the Golden Gate Bridge at night framed on the walls. It looks like he’s been living here a while, the open closet door revealing a sizable chunk of wardrobe hanging up, a deflated soft-side suitcase on the shelf at the top, and a chaotic sea of shoes cluttering the floor. The nightstand on the left side of the bed is cluttered with the detritus of a single man’s daily life: cellphone, contact case, lotion, a lot of takeout containers. There’s crumpled tissues and discarded clothes on the floor. The bed hasn’t been made properly in a while, like Jensen leaves the ‘don’t bother cleaning’ tag on his doorknob most of the time.

“Jen, please.”

Jensen stops the little table over by the balcony doors and gives him a look Jared’s not even going to try to figure out. There’s a bottle of bourbon in the middle of the table, a stack of little glasses next to it. The wall-mounted flatscreen is on mute, SportsCenter doing pre-season segments on some National League teams Jared could give a shit about.

“You know, I’ve always wondered about the Jen thing,” Jensen says, shaking his head. He grabs the remote from the table and turns off the TV.

“What?”

“You never used to call me Jen. And okay, yeah, I would’ve probably killed you. I went through most of school being called Jenny, and that gives a guy a fuck of a complex.” He sits on the edge of the table and worries the bottom hem of the shirt. Jared leans on the wall to the left of the balcony door and watches him, thinks he looks thinner and paler than he used to (but then again, so does Jared). “But I guess I just stopped caring or something, and you kept it up. I was thinking about when that started, and I decided it must have been when the thing with Genevieve started. You call us both Jen, less chance of fucking up the names, right?”

Jared makes a strangled sound in his throat. “The fuck is that supposed to mean?” he says warningly.

“I’m genuinely curious, Jared,” Jensen says mildly, squaring himself back up to his full height. “It never used to bother me, but I can’t stop thinking about it now. Like, what is the first initial of the name you say in bed?”

“Why don’t you just go full-on Alanis on me?” Jared snaps, shoving away from the wall but not going any closer. “Would she go down on me in a theater?” he says mockingly. “Am I thinking of you when I fuck her?”

Jensen draws back half a step and gives him a hurt look. “That’s not my point,” he says. Jared snorts and Jensen finally snaps. He closes the space between them and slams his hand on the wall next to Jared’s head and his face goes red. “What we were—it wasn’t fair to anybody. Not me, not you, not Gen or Danny or Lila. It was unhealthy and it was sad and it was _killing_ me, okay? So I stepped back. It was out of hand. And fuck you! You don’t get to stand here, drunk off your ass and acting like you’re the only wounded party. You said you loved me and then _you left me_.”

“We were finished!” Jared growls.

“Bullshit,” Jensen hisses back. “This thing is never gonna be finished and you and me both know it.”

Jared swallows down whatever hurtful thing he was thinking about slinging back at him and just stares down at him. It’s always gotten him off just a little that Jensen is just enough shorter than him that he has to look up when they’re this close. Jensen’s not a small guy by any means, but he’s smaller than Jared is, built slim and just this side of pretty.

“If I kiss you are you going to hit me?” Jared asks, watching in fascination as Jensen’s breath hitches and his tongue darts out to wet his lips. 

Jensen shakes his head. “You shouldn’t, though,” he says.

Jared puts one tentative hand on his waist, feeling the muscles skitter and jump under his palm. “I should probably go,” he says. Jensen nods, melting forward and burying his face in Jared’s chest.

They stand like that for several minutes, wrapped up in each other. Jensen pulls back a little and looks up at him with a sad kind of smile. “Or you could stay,” he says.

“Or I could stay,” Jared agrees.

“I’m tired of fighting,” Jensen says. “I’m tired of everything, you know?” He takes a few steps away and idly gathers up some discarded clothes on the ground. “It’s stupid, but I always just slept better when you were around. I don’t want to—can we just sleep?”

Jared grins so big he thinks Jensen can probably see his second molars, and he’s closing up the distance between them again and crushing him in a hug before he can think about it. He doesn’t have him back, not yet, but this is enough for now, he thinks.

\--

“Northwest Airlines flight 629 to Las Vegas is now boarding at Gate 27,” a tinny female voice announced barely audible over the airport din.

Jared grinned. “That’s us,” he said.

“Are we absolutely, completely, one hundred percent fucking sure that we’re going to do this?” Gen asked, squeezing Jared’s hands and looking up at him beseechingly. She bit her bottom lip.

He leaned down and kisses her lightly, running his tongue over the slightly puffy spot she’s been worrying all afternoon. “I am absolutely sure,” he said.

She nodded, still not looking completely convinced, but she threaded her hand with his and shouldered her bag. “Well, okay then,” she said. “I’m just confused, I guess, as to why we’re just running off to Vegas instead of having, you know, a real ceremony in front of our family and friends.”

Jared swallowed and busied himself with dodging a group of Asian tourists. “The thought of going through the whole wedding thing makes me physically ill,” Jared said. “I was best man in the single worst wedding in history, seriously. I cannot do that again.”

She smiled a little. “I promise I don’t have Bridezilla tendencies,” she said.

“Yeah, Danneel said the same thing. Lies, by the way,” he added. The terminal wasn’t as crowded as he expected, but their gate was way at the far end. He glanced down at Gen and tried to ignore the look on her face, the slightly annoyed, slightly dubious one that she always got when Jensen came up in conversation.

“Well, come on,” she said, flashing a bright smile. “Our winged chariot awaits.”

\--

April rolls around. Jensen delivers more babies, goes to a Giants game with Jared and Andy, and starts to feel like he’s found a footing in the silty bottom of the lake he was thrown into.

He gets a phone call from Genevieve right before Easter, mostly questions she has about follow-up and whatnot, and he finds that it’s not so hard to hear her voice. He’s always liked her, always been very careful not to resent her (after all, he had all the parts of Jared that mattered). 

Somehow, he finds himself accepting an invitation to her Easter banquet, dinner because there’s a day game and she’s got lonely boys to feed. He and Jared might have come to an understanding, might even be circling back around to being friends again, but they’re not even a little bit okay enough to be forced to interact with people.

“I would have done it for anyone,” he insists, trying to play professional, trying to beg off.

He’s not up to skirting around Jared or a room full of people. He doesn’t really have anywhere else to go, either, his sister flying back to Texas to meet their brother’s new fiancée, and it’s still too soon to be breaking bread with Danneel. They are planning to get together to hide eggs and chocolate bunnies for Lila, no matter how many times Jensen points out that Lila isn’t even a year old yet. Danneel insists that it’s the principle of the idea that’s important.

“Mommy and Daddy and a holiday, okay?” she says. 

Genevieve isn’t having any of his excuses, though. “It meant everything to me, Jensen,” she says quietly. 

He can see her in his mind, standing there in the beautiful kitchen of the little house in Berkeley that Jared bought after they got back from Vegas, twisting a chunk of hair around her finger while she talks. 

“And don’t you dare say it was because it’s your job. You let me cry on you and you stroked my hair and you told me it would be okay.”

“Okay,” he acquiesces, pressing his phone hard against his face and closing his eyes. “But there better be meat.”

When he pulls into the driveway on Easter, he’s the first to arrive, but he usually tries to be early to such things in case the host needs help. Genevieve is kneeling out front, transplanting Jensen’s yellow tulips from the pot to a planter box next to the front door. Jared’s red Explorer is gleaming in the sunlight, probably freshly washed and waxed and taking up half the driveway. Jensen parks his sensible little Oldsmobile behind it, thinking their cars are going to look low-rent and silly compared to some of the bonus baby Escalades and Maseratis that will also be attending.

“You made it!” says Genevieve, springing to her feet and shucking off her soil covered gardening gloves. He comes around the car and lets her pull him down into a hug. “I’m so glad. You’re kinda early, though.”

He shrugs. “Nothing better to do. Need help with anything?”

She grins. “Let’s go in and see. The caterer’s got Jared running ragged. It’s some funny shit, you should see it.”

He helps her carry her gardening supplies into the garage when she finishes, and follows her into the kitchen and helps himself to a glass of orange juice while she washes her hands.

“Ugh,” she says, coming to stand next to him against the counter, trying to keep out of the path of the caterer, a tiny blonde woman in a blue jacket who keeps barreling in and out of the room, muttering to herself. Genevieve pokes the side of the juice carton and scowls. “You know what I don’t get? Why I have to choose between having lots of pulp and having added calcium. Who decided that people who want extra calcium in their diets via orange juice have to give up pulp? I love pulp, but I’m also realistic about the fact I’m female and I need to consume, like, a zillion milligrams of calcium so that my bones don’t turn into sponges on my fortieth birthday, you know?”

Jensen stares at her for a second. “What?”

She frowns and grabs the carton. “Okay, my point is that it’s arbitrary and cruel that the people at Tropicana just decided that people have to choose between calcium and fiber,” she says. “Why bother fortifying your juice with one thing if you’re going to just take away some other nutrient?”

“So… buy juice with pulp and drink milk, or stir fiber powder into your juice with calcium,” he suggests.

“That isn’t the point!” she says. “Maybe I just like pulp, dammit!”

“Jared doesn’t,” he points out.

“Fair enough,” she says after a second, giving him a sideways look. He busies himself with finishing off his glass, and she puts the carton away.

“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I like pulp, too.”

“I know,” she says. She gives him a strained smile. “You know, there was a long time there when it would already be gone by the time I would get there. And I never really minded as much as I probably should’ve, come to think of it.”

Jensen turns sharply, startled. “Are we talking about—”

“I have eyes, Jensen,” she says gently. She stands on her toes and starts pulling dishes down from a cupboard. “I wasn’t going to accept his proposal, you know. When he asked me, I told him I’d think about it. I was going to let him down easy, maybe give him a shove in the right direction. But then Danneel got pregnant, so I thought ‘hey, wait, maybe there is a chance for me,’ and I said yes. And then the next thing I know, we’re running off to Vegas.”

Jensen doesn’t know what to say to that, so he takes the stack of plates from her and carries them into the dining room to help her set the table. There are two caterers setting up a buffet table. 

“Your husband is grabbing us another table. He said you had one upstairs,” one of them says to Genevieve.

Before Jensen can come up with anything to say, there’s a knock at the front door, and then the whole house is full of people.

For some reason, Misha and his wife are there, too, even though Jensen was pretty sure they were only his friends. Predictably, Misha and Barry Zito get along like they were separated at birth. Jared’s scrub nurse, Sandy, who Jensen adores, hugs him and compliments him on his sweater. Her husband asks him for advice on his golf game.

“The color really brings out your eyes,” Sandy tells Jensen, patting him on the arm.

“Thank you,” Jensen replies.

Jared catches his eye from across the room and nods, smiling a little. Jensen can’t help himself and smiles back. It’s enough.

\--

The accident happened Halloween weekend of Jensen’s sophomore year of college. 

“It’s not looking good, kiddo,” was the first thing Jensen’s father said when he woke up in the hospital and asked what happened. He’d never seen his father look so old or grave, but he was on a powerful morphine drip and the world was fuzzy.

“You’re been unconscious for five days,” said Dad, grave like Jensen had never seen. 

“Where’s Mom?” Jensen croaked, throat raw like he’d been swilling gasoline. Dad looked away, and then Jensen remembered.

His parents and Mackenzie had flown out to California for the weekend, though Dad was irritable about being away from work and Mom had the flu, but it was the first time he’d seen them since July and he didn’t care how much they sniped at each other. They were all going out to eat, dragging Jensen’s long-suffering roommate along with them. Mackenzie had torn her ACL playing volleyball, so she had to stretch her leg out across the backseat, and Mom and Dad had some awful fight right before they left. Steve, who drove a little Nissan, offered her his passenger seat and she accepted, sniffing at Dad, “At least some men here are gentlemen.”

He missed both funerals, stuck at UCLA Medical Center in intensive care. Steve’s parents and stepbrother came and sat with him a lot, insisting they didn’t blame him for surviving. Dad and Mackenzie flew back a few days after Mom’s funeral, just in time for Steve’s, and Mackenzie and the stepbrother took about a million pictures between them.

“They’re not sure if you’ll ever walk again,” Dad continued, looking away. “They’re saying possible nerve damage, and that your pelvis is broken in three places. Apparently you got an angel watching out for you, though. None of your organs were damaged.”

“Dad, I’m—”

Altogether, the recovery and physical therapy took more than a year, but Jensen was back in school by the next fall, a new life plan in mind, hobbling around on crutches. There was talk of cosmetic surgery to correct the terrible scarring left behind, all the ruined skin on his right side, but it didn’t bother Jensen. He was self-flagellating enough to own it, he thought. And anyway, it wasn’t like he intended for anyone to see it.

“You’re lucky you don’t remember the accident,” his sister told him one day before he was discharged. She was painting his toenails bright purple while he laid in bed and enjoyed being whacked out of his gourd on painkillers. His thoughts were sluggish, stuck on the pavement, the burning Nissan, but he shook himself.

“I remember some of it,” he admitted.

She gave him a sharp look and shook her head, screwing the cap back on the bottle of polish. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “Okay? Please don’t tell me.”

“Okay,” he said.

\--

It’s been a long shift and Jared is tired. He’s sleeping poorly, catching a couple hours in his office or an on-call room when he can. He wonders sometimes how he does his job at all. He’s depressed, he knows he is, which is just great. It’s May now, a year since Jensen broke it off, six months since DC, one month since Gen and Andy moved across the Bay. He doesn’t want to go home to an empty house, so he drifts around looking for something to do.

He watches some TV in a lounge, listens to some nurses gossip, signs off on some paperwork, and does a round of his post-ops. They’re mostly all asleep, the only one awake a little Asian girl who swallowed three keys. He gives her a Chupa-Chup and gets her undying love, even though she can’t pronounce his name. He’s just heading to the cafeteria to get something to eat when his pager goes off.

Jared spends the next six hours trying to staunch internal bleeding, a one-car car accident on San Leandro, Jaws of Life and a paramedic yelling like the end of the world. But eventually the patient flatlines, tipping over from mostly dead into the dark and quiet. 

“Time of death,” says Jared, squinting at the clock high up on the wall, “Three nineteen.”

After he strips off his bloody scrubs, takes a shower and has a granola bar, he collapses in an on-call room and grabs a few hours of sleep.

A nurse comes to wake him up, looking nervous. “Um, Dr. P. Jared. Wake up.”

He cracks open an eye. “Go away.”

“I got a next of kin who won’t stop shouting until he gets to scream at the surgeon who killed his husband.”

Jared groans and rolls onto his back. “God, this might sound insensitive of me, but can’t you say something about Prop 8 and get him to shut up.”

She raises her eyebrows. “He beat me to it,” she says after a moment. “And I was like, dude, you’re fuckin’ Seth Vincennes, you can scream at me all day, just let me stare at you.” She smiles weakly.

“Wait,” says Jared, sitting up and giving her an odd look. “Like, _Aquaman_ Seth Vincennes?”

“In the flesh and voice, screaming the whole hospital down. Prima donna.”

“Can you calm him down a little, get him some coffee, maybe? Put him in one of the conference rooms?” The nurse nods and Jared sits up and stretches. “I’ll be down in a minute, gonna go splash some water on my face.”

He takes his time, giving the bereaved a chance to collect himself. When he slips into the conference room, he finds a slim, dark-haired man standing by the windows, one hand on the glass.

“Mr. Vincennes,” he says.

The man turns to him, wide-eyed and pale. He’s very good looking, pretty in the same way Jensen is, blue eyes and shiny white veneers, but Jared is struck by how little he is. Maybe it’s the fear and confusion and grief on his face making him small, but he barely reaches Jared’s shoulder. He’s wearing pajama bottoms and a Dodgers shirt that’s too big for him, a community property shirt, and Jared has to look away.

“Are you the doctor?” he asks, voice soft and faintly Southern accented.

“Dr. Padalecki,” says Jared, holding out a hand. Vincennes regards it suspiciously for a moment, then takes it and shakes up and down twice, dropping it quickly and stepping away again.

“He died on your operating table,” says Vincennes.

“He lost a lot of blood at the scene,” says Jared delicately, gesturing toward the table in the middle of the room and waiting for Vincennes to take a seat. “We tried everything we could, but the damage was already too extensive.”

He looks away while Vincennes covers his face with his hands, shaking badly. “We’re up here to see my sister, she just had a baby,” he says finally. “Yesterday we went surfing at Half Moon Bay. He had to have Chinese food, went out late, didn’t come back, and I.”

Jared nods. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Vincennes.”

Vincennes looks up. “I feel like I’ve been ripped open,” he says. “Ripped open and everything inside removed, thrown into the ocean. I’m not. What do I do? I don’t even know what—not going to survive this, don’t think.” He stands up and paces back over to the window, staring at the view of Oakland below. 

It’s early morning, barely past sunrise. Jared wonders how Vincennes got to the hospital so fast, how quickly he must have figured out something was wrong. Did he just know, Jared wonders, did he feel the screaming metal crush the same time his husband did? How long does it take to get to that point?

“He was everything and now he’s—” Vincennes sways on his feet and crumples onto the chair behind him, nothing but the wrapper left behind. “No. No.”

\--

“So you’re the famous Jared,” said Danneel, offering a hand. Her handshake was firm and strong, and she was gorgeous and glowing in a knee-length fuchsia dress. Of course she was gorgeous, Jared thought, but he gave her his best smile. The lobby of her building was beautiful, too, a doorman and windows to let in the winter sunlight.

“I’m the famous Jared,” he agreed. His tone was friendly, warm and open. Jensen eyed them cautiously, but Jared just clapped a hand down on his shoulder and squeezed. Danneel’s eyes rested on the contact for a second and the look on her face flickered, but Jared didn’t think Jensen noticed. He took his hand back.

“I’ve only told her good things,” Jensen promised. His tone was a little stilted. Jared had the mean impulse to ask what exactly those good things were.

Danneel smiled. “I hear you have a fantastic appetite,” she said. “That’s good. I like a man who can eat.”

“I hear you’re a real fine cook,” said Jared, really laying on the charm and hoping it would distract her from the fact Jensen was still staring at him.

She slipped her arm through his and leaned in close. “Why don’t you walk up with me and I’ll tell you all about it. Jen can wait for everyone else, right?”

Jensen blinked at her, and after a moment he nodded. “Sure, yeah. Uh, wine’s in the fridge if you want to start in on that.” He checked his watch and frowned, a little furrow between his brows that Jared didn’t recognize at all. “Misha and his wife’ll be here soon, and Mackenzie and Aaron.”

“So what, I’m a seventh wheel here?” Jared joked.

“Oh, don’t you worry about that,” said Danneel, patting him with her free hand and steering him toward the elevators. “I have a single friend coming for you. Her name’s Katie and she’s a real catch. You’ll just love her.”

Katie turned out to be Jensen’s sister's boss, a young, no-nonsense brunette with big eyes and a throaty laugh. She told filthy jokes all through dinner and traded bawdy stories with Misha and his wife, while Danneel entertained Mackenzie and her fiancé, and Jensen at there looking vaguely uncomfortable.

Danneel’s dinner was wonderful, of course, which made Jared hate her just that much more. He got drunk on the screwdrivers she served after dinner, made out with Jensen in the hallway, and went home with Katie after the party. He found, to his delight, that the dirty talk and deep laugh extended to her brightly colored bedroom as well.

Before he left the next morning, still wet from a quick shower and sharing coffee and biscotti in the kitchen, Katie stopped him. “You could just tell him,” she said. “Before everything starts moving like the rails are greased. Just tell him.”

“What?” he asked, feigning ignorance.

She shook her head. “Nevermind,” she said. She walked him to the door, cinching the belt of her peignoir while he pulled on his coat and scarf for the January chill. She handed him her card and told him to call her sometime. She didn’t sound like she was hoping for it.

He didn’t call. 

\--

Jared doesn’t have the patience to wait for an elevator, and the office Jensen shares with the other OB/Gyn residents is on the fifth floor. He runs up five flights of stairs, glad the stairwell is empty as always, and walks as briskly as he can through the twisting hallway.

He knocks sharply when he reaches the door with Jensen’s name on it. “Just a minute!”

“I can’t give this up,” says Jared breathlessly as soon as Jensen opens the door.

Jensen stares at him for a second. “Um, okay,” he says. “I guess come in.” He takes a step back and lets Jared into the office, and Jared suddenly feels too big to be allowed and too wild to fit in the tiny room. “What are you talking about?” Jensen says slowly once they’re seated on opposite sides of the desk.

“I love you,” says Jared. Jensen raises his eyebrows and opens his mouth to respond but Jared lunges across the desk and covers his mouth. “No, don’t—don’t say anything yet. I have to, um. I have to say this. So let me, okay?” 

Jensen nods and Jared removes his hand, but he doesn’t retake his seat. He sits on the edge of the desk and twists his torso so that he can look at Jensen.

“You have been the best thing in my life for eight years. Even when I couldn’t even admit it to myself, or when you finally got sick of me and ended it. I don’t know if you know this, but I’m kind of a huge dick sometimes. Like, high-quality deadbeat asshole, right here.” He runs his hands through his hair and sneaks a look at Jensen. “That Padalecki kid, man, what a douche.” 

Jensen swallows heavily, raises an eyebrow. “Can I ask what brought this on?”

“Lost a patient last night. This morning, talked to the husband, said he was his everything. Wasn’t gonna survive losing him. Uh, two dudes, by the way. And all I could think was the only way I would know how he would feel was if I lost you. Nobody else comes close. My god, I’m a horrible person. Fuck.”

“You know, this whole thing is just stupid if you think about it,” says Jensen, shaking his head, sitting back and looking amazed. “Do you remember that next day after we met? We got up and went to class—”

“Pharmacology,” Jared interrupts. “Shapiro.”

Jensen smiles faintly, still staring into the distance. “After class we went to the diner, and I had waffles. I don’t even like waffles, you know? But I didn’t even know what the hell I was ordering because I was so deliriously happy right then. Because we were just sitting there in that diner, shooting the shit, and I just knew.” He gives a helpless what-can-I-do shrug. “That was it for me. I was done. I’d found mine.”

Jared feels very cold all of a sudden. “Please don’t take this the wrong way,” he says blinking rapidly, “but what the fucking fuck? Why didn’t you say anything? Ever?”

Jensen makes a high-pitched derisive sound. “You never seemed to—it never seemed like you felt it the same way I did. I was in love with you, and if being near you meant I had to take what I could get, well. That’s what I did.” He leans forward and gives Jared a grim smile. 

Jared stares at him, thinking, this changes everything, the sky is red, the A’s have won the pennant, you can’t pull this kinda switch on me.

“You ever sit and think about how much of this coulda been avoided?” says Jared, croaking and kind of sick to his stomach, lurching feeling in his chest like driving too fast over the hills. “Like, if we woulda done this one thing different, if I hadn’t said that or you hadn’t done this.”

“Everyday,” says Jensen, then he’s standing up, rounding the desk and stopping in front of Jared. He puts a tentative hand on his cheek, which Jared leans into, and that cracks something and spreads a smile across his face. 

“So, um, pay attention,” says Jared, pulling him close. “I love you.”

\--

Jensen promised himself that he would end the thing with Jared if kids got involved. It wasn’t that he was planning on having any, and he didn’t think Danneel wanted them either, but just in case. Jensen was a big believer in planning.

Less than six months after his mother died, his father remarried his secretary. Jensen was not suspicious. He didn’t need to be; his father’s affair was long standing and pretty much general knowledge.

“How lucky for Gina that Mom kicked the bucket, huh?” his sister said to him once. Jensen had nothing against his stepmother, but he didn’t want to get to know her, either, and he very much resented his father for putting him in the awkward situation in the first place. He promised himself he would never do that to his kids.

He thought about it a lot over the course of Danneel’s pregnancy, how to bring it up with Jared, what to say, how Jared might react.

And then, not too long before Lila was born, he couldn’t take it anymore. Danneel was going through a “get away from me, I don’t even want to look at you, it’s your fault I’m huge and miserable” period where she didn’t even want to look at him, and Genevieve was on a ten-game roadtrip out east, so he slept at Jared’s.

And then one night, he rolled over and stared out into the empty bedroom and he said, “This has got to stop.”

 

THE END


End file.
